Introduction to the Issue Trafficking, A Useless Category of Historical Analysis

Editorial Note

Special Issue: Migration, Sex, and Intimate Labor

Philippa Hetherington and Julia Laite, Special Issue Guest Editors

Introduction to the Issue: Trafficking, a Useless Category of Historical Analysis?

When we first sat down to propose this Special Issue, the question of what to call it was foremost in our minds. Eventually, we settled on “Migration, Sex, and Intimate Labor,” which we felt captured the nexus of phenomena we wanted authors to explore while avoiding the troubling term “trafficking” which we—initially jokingly—had taken to referring to as a “useless category of historical analysis” (with apologies to Joan Scott). Trafficking, like the term “white slavery” that preceded it and “modern slavery” that has overtaken it in some political discourse, is a historically contingent concept; it is a moving signifier that hides as much as it reveals.1 At times, “trafficking” signified the illegal movement of people organized by third parties, but the term was also used more vaguely before modern border control and immigration law defined such crimes. Some people who used the term deployed it to directly refer to coercion, others used it as a term that simply described both the consensual and non-consensual movement of women labeled “prostitutes” (or to define such movement as inherently non-consensual). “Trafficking” in international law was a term applied to the illicit movement of people, but was also (especially by the early twentieth century) used to describe the illegal movement of arms, drugs, and art. The malleability of the term in the past can also be found in the present. While organizations and states continue to use “trafficking” as a normative category of law and experience, its precise definition and parameters remain blurry and imprecise. It is this very imprecision that allows states and others to deploy the specter of “trafficking” to enact laws and policies against migration and sex work that focus on criminalization (of migration, of sex work) and rarely address the actual exploitation or harm at hand. This strategic use of the concept has a long history, which forms one of the key themes of this historiographical review.

In this extended introduction to the Special Issue, we want to reflect upon the vibrant and growing field of scholarship on the history of trafficking that, in one way or another, grapples with these terms while attempting to understand the structures, cultures, laws, and lived experiences that underlay them in different times and places. We begin by examining this

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 7–39.

scholarship’s roots in work on women’s prostitution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and move on to explore particular flashpoints within this historiography: the places where trafficking, used in any normative sense, grows increasingly difficult to pin down and explain. Caught up within racialized concepts of migration, belonging, and citizenship; complex ideas about gender, sex, and labor; and troubling analogies of enslavement, trafficking’s history as a term, one could argue, has little useful explanatory power, other than the way it reveals the socio-political contexts in which it was deployed. The articles in this special issue cover the period roughly between 1880 and 1980, taking us from the late nineteenth century, when concepts of trafficking and exploited prostitution were first being articulated and codified, to the late twentieth century and the resurgence of “trafficking” as a subject of concern during a period of geopolitical upheaval and increased migration. This special issue showcases some of the newest work on migration, sex, and intimate labor, and in their own way, all the articles complicate the terms we use to articulate these phenomena not only in the past, but also in the present.

Prostitution, “White Slavery,” and the Racialized Other

Despite the contemporary academic and political drive to reimagine trafficking beyond the sex trade and (for certain policy makers) to rebrand this complex nexus of migration, work, and exploitation “modern slavery,” it remains the case that the majority of historical scholarship on trafficking has emerged out of histories of sexual labor and prostitution.

Much of the earliest serious historical scholarship from the 1980s and early 1990s examined the history of prostitution’s regulation by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century states. This regulation took various forms, but usually involved registering suspected prostitutes and licensing premises and stipulating the places they could operate, and always involved the medical surveillance—through compulsory examination and treatment, and often through incarceration—of women who sold sex. These early historians of prostitution examined the structure of these regulated systems and the experiences of women subjected to them, but most of all they explored the late-nineteenth century campaigns that called for their abolition. The state, these campaigners claimed, was infringing on the rights of women and simultaneously “licensing vice.” As historians have ably shown, these campaigns intertwined with the wider women’s movement, and with internationalism, radical liberalism, socialism, and anti-statism, as well as with older, more conservative movements for “moral reform.”2

These campaigns against state regulation, as early historians of prostitution noted, quickly made the connection between state-regulated systems

and the exploitation of women within prostitution through force, coercion, and fraud, which often involved the migration of women within and across state borders. The work of Donna J. Guy and Edward Bristow examined the interplay between state regulation in the Americas, and the growing concern about the “traffic” in poor Jewish women from Europe to work in legalized brothels in Buenos Aires.3 As scholarship on the state control of prostitution began to grow, historians such as Philippa Levine and Stephen Legg became interested in regulation within empires.4 Other historians, such as Anne Summers, explored the transnational nature of mid-to-late nineteenth-century anti-regulationist campaigns.5

In the late nineteenth century, a series of shocking exposés in Britain, including the famous newspaper scandal called “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in1885, highlighted how state regulation and the low age of consent encouraged the widespread sexual exploitation of very young girls in prostitution. In this period, anti-regulationist campaigners turned more explicitly to questions of exploited and migrant prostitution, which had begun to be labeled “white slavery,” especially by a growing popular press. “White slavery” or “the traffic in women and children,” as it was sometimes contemporaneously called, had by the early twentieth century taken on the characteristics of a widespread, international moral panic: filling the pages of newspapers, the plots of dime novels, and the reels of early films. By the early 2000s, historians had grown very interested in this moral panic and its underlying realities, and a rich scholarship on the subject began to develop.6

From their very inception, and as historians of the discursive use of “white slavery” and “trafficking” demonstrate, these terms were malleable, complex, and entangled with racialized and moralized conceptualizations of gender, work, citizenship, and sexuality. In some cases, “white slavery” was used as a synonym for prostitution itself; in other cases, it was used to refer specifically to exploitation; in still others, it referred to migrant prostitution and “prostitutes” who crossed borders. And while some, mostly feminist, anti-trafficking campaigners demanded an end to the state regulation that they believed fueled “the infamous traffic,” others, mostly conservative moral reformers, felt that an alliance with pro-regulationists was necessary to stop the greater crime of trafficking.7

Historians like Rachel Schrieber, Brian Donovan, and Rachael Attwood have tried to make sense of trafficking as a political discourse, a media phenomenon, and a cultural script, and they have uncovered the racialized, sexualized, and gendered meanings of “trafficking” and “white slavery” in the early twentieth century. This theme in the scholarship is one of the richest and most well-developed areas of trafficking history.8

The term “white slavery” had always been deeply racialized, used especially in the early modern period and the eighteenth century to describe the kidnap and enslavement (imagined or real) of white people in North Africa and the Americas. Gunther Peck’s work examines the terms’ particular salience in the nineteenth-century United States, where people used it initially to denote the “wage slavery” of white American workers in the shadow of the recent end of chattel slavery (and to tacitly erase the ongoing exploitation of free Black American workers). Peck diligently and carefully demonstrates the way the term began to shift, to become sexualized, feminized, and synonymous with the exploitation of white women in prostitution—or with prostitution itself—by the early twentieth century, a process that happened in transnational conversation especially between the United States and Britain.9 Jessica R. Pliley, meanwhile, takes this further and examines how these discourses functioned to make invisible the sexual exploitation of Black women in the US.10

In Britain, which had discursively distanced itself from the history and practice of slavery by the early twentieth century, the term continued to hark back to real and imagined forms of white kidnap and exploitation within the empire, and particularly the sexualized dangers white women were thought to encounter when they traveled to these imperial spaces.11 The rich scholarship on “white slavery” and trafficking in these contexts demonstrates how these discourses manifested anxieties over maintaining the optics of white supremacy (the idea of white superiority upon which rested the moral authority of empire), and over racial mixing. As Philip Howell has shown, fears about “white slavery” were operating alongside surviving and strictly racially segregated forms of state and colonial regulation.12

At other times, as Rachel Attwood’s work shows, it was the exploitation of white British women within the brothels of the Continent that was dubbed “white slavery,” signaling the way in which the British imagination continued to racialize its nearest European neighbors, especially the French.13 At still other times, the term could be used in Britain to describe the exploited prostitution of non-white women, despite the obvious cognitive dissonance this caused. In France, the traite des blanches [trade in white women] was similarly racialized through the specter of white French women selling sex in notorious sites of empire but equally applied to the problem at home where white men constituted the vast majority of the clientele. It was a similar story in Argentina, where la trata de blancas [trade in white women] usually referred to the organized, and exploited, prostitution of an ethnically diverse group of women by a similarly diverse group of men, especially among Jewish migrants.14

The racializing power of the term “white slavery” is further complicated because, at the time of its inception in the early twentieth century as a

term related to prostitution, it was Jews whom journalists and anti-trafficking campaigners most often imagined to be engaged in it.15 The “infamous traffic” of Jewish women by Jewish men to South America, North America, Africa, and the Middle East was the most common way in which people understood trafficking. This stereotype was caught up within widespread discourses of anti-Semitism and helped to construct an understanding of Jewish traffickers as operating within an organized, international cabal. But at the same time, this discourse highlighted the victimhood—the “white slavery”—of Jewish women. As Mir Yarfitz evocatively puts it in his recent book Impure Migration, “white slavery” discourse “whitened” Jewish women and “darkened” Jewish men. Ultimately, as this example ably shows, the discourse of white slavery did not just reflect but also created new understandings of race.16

Officials’ concern with “white slavery” also rendered other forms of trafficking and the victimization of women of color nearly invisible in contemporary discourse and policy. Historians are beginning to uncover these elisions and bring global majority voices into the frame. Julia Martínez, Kazuhiro Oharazeki, Sandy F. Chang, and others have explored trafficking within the context of East Asia and the Pacific, while Francesca Biancani, Johan Mathew, Caroline Séquin, and Liat Kozma’s work examines trafficking and sex work in Africa and the Middle East.17

“White slavery” is undeniably a racialized term, but it was racialized in specific ways at specific times and places. It was deployed within discourses of xenophobia, nativism, and anti-Semitism, but also within the antiAsian racism of the “yellow peril,” and within narratives of anti-Blackness (particularly in the United States).18 The term was borrowed, re-used, and cross-fertilized, to create complex meanings attached both to the concept of racialized “whiteness” but also the “whiteness” of sexual purity. Indeed, in many places, the term for the traffic in women and children in prostitution made no reference to whiteness at all. In German the term was mädchenhandel [traffic in girls], and in Russian it was torgovlia zhenshchinami [trading in women]. The Chinese used the term banu [white slavery] infrequently; but widely discussed the term fànmài fānù, which translates to the “illegal sale of women and girls.”19 Of course, the lack of reference to “whiteness” or to “slavery” did not signify an absence of racialization in these cases, but that, through these terms, racialization functioned in different ways.

The German term especially encourages us to explore the sexualization and feminization of the concept of what we now call “trafficking,” and the importance of the troublesome and malleable concept of “girlhood.” Since the 1880s, it was concern over girls, that is, young, unmarried women that fueled the panic over white slavery and the anti-trafficking movement. These “girls” were moving around the world more than they ever had before,

working in more diverse industries, marrying later, and were increasingly seen as independent and active consumers. Women and girls supplied not only the labor for many globalizing industries but also the reproductive labor surrounding them: cleaning and caring for middle-class families as well as miners and canal diggers, selling sex to soldiers, and providing accommodation and companionship to working men in growing cities.20

These new freedoms and mobilities came with widespread anxiety about “protecting” such young women from the dangers of modern life, as well as from their own lack of discipline and sexual continence. Even as the global economy was hungry for the labor of women, western, and arguably global, culture was growing increasingly panicked about their independence and mobility. The “white slavery” panic of the early twentieth century centered on the idea of the missing daughter: the young woman or girl who left home for work and romance only to disappear, duped into prostitution by pimps and imprisoned in hidden urban brothels. These women, who were increasingly beyond what many thought to be the benign control of the home, the family, and social institutions, were seen as both threatened and threatening. On the one hand, they were presented as the idealized victims of monstrous criminals; on the other—particularly when they did not fit the image of white, innocent, respectable young women—they were depicted as undesirable migrants, “morally insane” girls, and dangerous criminals themselves.21

Trafficking, Internationalism, and Transnational History

However trafficking was named and defined, it is clear that migrant and/or exploited prostitution emerged as one of the most pressing international issues in the two decades before the First World War. The scandals about “the traffic in women and girls” that appeared in global newspapers in the 1880s inspired the development of an “anti-trafficking” movement. The first of these organizations was the International Abolitionist Federation (IAF). It had grown directly out of the campaigns against regulated prostitution, but by the 1890s, had merged the cause of anti-trafficking and anti-regulationism together, and saw both through an anti-statist, feminist, and liberal lens, paying special attention to women’s rights. But the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (or IB) soon eclipsed the IAF. The IB was, in essence, the anti-trafficking arm of the National Vigilance Association, a social purity organization founded in Britain in the aftermath of the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon Scandal and the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, arguably Britain’s first anti-trafficking law.

As the work of Rachel Attwood, Julia Laite, and Lucy Bland has shown, the IB—led by their moralizing secretary William Coote—was the dominant force in international anti-trafficking movements for the next several decades, and married this cause to others, including anti-pornography, the censoring of indecent performances, and other purity crusades. Crucially for the story of trafficking, Coote and the IB supported migration restrictions on “foreign prostitutes” in the name of anti-trafficking, and were even willing to ally themselves with regulationists who advocated for legal brothels with strict immigration controls.22

That anti-trafficking became a social issue of international significance is evidenced by its specific inclusion within the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations. As per the treaty’s stipulation, a special Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children was set up in 1919, tasked with assessing the scale and nature of trafficking, and developing potential international and national solutions. Early histories of these endeavors were largely positivist, placing anti-trafficking within a wider context of international humanitarianism after the First World War.23 Subsequent assessments of anti-trafficking within the League have taken a significantly more critical view. As Pliley, Magaly Rodríguez García, Stephanie Limoncelli, and others have shown, the early divisions within anti-trafficking were soon playing out on the international stage; between those willing to work with regulationists if it meant better controlling the movements and behavior of “prostitutes,” and those who saw regulation as the primary cause of trafficking and refused to countenance “laws of exception” directed against women in the name of preventing trafficking.24

In 1924, the Advisory Board, with the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, commissioned an investigation that would determine the extent and nature of “the international traffic in women.” Led by a prominent American physician who was involved in the interwar “social hygiene” movement, the investigation sent nine undercover investigators to major world cities and other key sites in western Europe, Africa, South America, and North America to interview officials and organizations, as well as pimps, traffickers, brothel keepers, and women who sold sex. The notes of one of the investigators—Paul Kinsie—have been compiled into a critical sourcebook by Jean-Michel Chaumont, Magaly Rodríguez García, and Paul Servais.25 As Chaumont argues in his earlier work, this investigation and the subsequent report it produced was an exercise in influential myth-making about trafficking, and many historians have critiqued the research methodologies and evidentiary bases of the report’s claims.26

Nonetheless, the report did contain some meaningful assertions that ran counter to expectations. Trafficking, it claimed, was just as common within a nation’s borders as across them, which suggested that tackling it

was not simply a question of border control. Moreover, in contrast to the moral panic about “white slavery,” the majority of women who were trafficked into prostitution abroad had already been selling sex. The offence, then, was not in luring “innocent” women into the sex industry, but in defrauding women who sold sex as to the conditions of their work. In other words, sex trafficking looked very similar to all other forms of coercive labor practices.27 These findings, however revelatory, had little impact on international or national approaches to the problem.

The League’s Advisory Committee also changed the word the international humanitarian and legal community used to describe the phenomena with which they were concerned, namely, sexual exploitation and women’s migration for sexual labor. They recognized that the term “white slavery” ignored how the issue of exploited or coerced migrant prostitution affected non-white women as well. After some debate, the Advisory Committee officially chose the term “the traffic in women and children.” The change in terminology did little to alter the racialized underpinnings of anti-trafficking policies, which remained primarily concerned with the victimhood of white women. But changing “white slavery” to a less-sensationalized term more in keeping with the language of international humanitarianism, helped to naturalize the concept of trafficking for decades to come—even if those who used it were no closer to delineating its actual meaning.

By the 1930s, the Advisory Committee had lost much of its independence, and the feminist influence on its mandate waned even further. Feminists argued against suggestions that women be barred from leaving their countries without the permission of their father, husband, or the state, and campaigned against measures to compulsorily repatriate all foreign women found working in brothels. While the first did not become official policy (though it was practiced in certain countries), the latter—in the harsher form of deportation—is now common practice around the world.

Many initiatives of the anti-trafficking movement paused with the outbreak of the Second World War and the subsequent collapse of the League of Nations. The same is true of the historiography: the vast majority of work on trafficking remains concentrated in the years between 1880 and 1945. Post-war histories of trafficking—as a concept and as a social phenomenon—are just beginning to emerge. In the case of trafficking on the international stage, historians Philippa Hetherington and Sonja Dolinsek have found both change and continuity, as the UN began to struggle with the issue of trafficking and exploited prostitution on the road to and from the drafting of the 1949 Convention Against the Trafficking in Persons.28

As these works show, the historiography of trafficking has contributed immensely to wider understandings of the history of internationalism. As one of the very first issues around which “internationalists” rallied, anti-

trafficking movements helped to build the wider structure and culture of both political and humanitarian internationalism.29 But the historiography of trafficking is also transnational and global, and encapsulates the challenges and possibilities of these overlapping scalar and thematic frames. Anti-trafficking campaigns were certainly a global phenomenon, connected to wider trends of globalization and global feminism in particular. Trafficking and migrant prostitution followed established migration networks and routes and was facilitated by the commercial interests of globally engaged employment agencies, and the multinational industries of mining, transport, manufacturing, and entertainment.30

Ultimately, however, it is the term “transnational” that we and other historians of trafficking find the most accurate to describe the history of the concept and the phenomenon, because of the way in which it involved exchanges—of ideas, people, and money—between countries that operated beyond and below the level of the state. While trafficking was of course a fundamental concern of early internationalists, and legal frameworks were often born out of the formal and informal mandates of internationalism, laws and policies changed according to other kinds of geopolitical and national concerns. As Pamela Fuentes (in this issue) and, earlier, Donna Guy, have argued, Latin American responses to trafficking, while part of a wider international conversation, were also developed according to postcolonial nation-building and migration norms specific to Latin America.31 Historians have uncovered a similar dynamic between empire, internationalism, and national interest in the case of East and South East Asia, where trafficking discourse was entangled with debates over militarized sexual labor, the practice of mui tsai, and entangled imperialisms.32 In South Asia, as Ashwini Tambe details, concerns about trafficking were simultaneously part of an internationalist and imperial project, and part of the postcolonial nation-building project.33

As Eva Payne, in this issue and elsewhere, Peck, and Pliley demonstrate, US and British anti-trafficking initiatives looked to each other—rather than to international organizations—when they developed their laws and policies.34 Southern and Eastern Europe were a different context again, as states coped with the pressures of international campaigns and the realities of their messy borderlands and cosmopolitan urban spaces.35 Russia and its contiguous empire and sphere of influence is another case, as Philippa Hetherington argues, opting to respond to trafficking fears through controlling out-migration—which, as Anna Dobrowolska shows in this special issue—echoed down the century and informed policy in post-war socialist Eastern Europe.36 Finally, as the work of Philippa Levine, Stephen Legg, Susan Pederson, and Liat Kozma have shown, early internationalist initiatives around trafficking and other social questions were grafted onto much older structures of imperial governance and colonial subjugation.37

But to provoke, what are historians of ‘trafficking’ writing a transnational history of? Is it a transnational history of sexuality or of labor? Is it the transnational history of crime or of migration? Is it a transnational history of conservative policy diffusion or of feminists’ engagement with the global community? Clearly it is all of these—and more—but these difficulties of historical categorization help demonstrate the concept’s ambiguities and the realities which underlay it.

Anti-Trafficking Law and Anti-Trafficking Practice

These conceptual quagmires help to explain the gulf that emerged between concepts, laws, and policies that sought to stop and punish trafficking and their actual implementation. Much of the earlier scholarship on “white slavery” examines its discursive and legal parameters, albeit primarily in domestic or nationally bounded contexts. More recently, historians have broadened their perspective in two directions: first, in the international and transnational legal context, and second in the ways these laws were put into imperfect practice.

Efforts to confront trafficking through law have occurred at international, transnational, national, and regional levels, and the historiography on law and trafficking reflects this. Whereas much early scholarship looked at national lawmaking in metropolitan Britain and the United States, the most recent work draws on the extensive research on trafficking and international organizations to focus on international (or transnational) conventions and agreements.38 Scholars of international law highlight the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century as one in which notions of “global administrative law” took shape in transnational agreements and conventions concerning topics as diverse as international postal systems, health cooperation, and crime control.39 The problem of “white slavery” was one of the first and most prominent questions addressed by this body of global administrative law. The period saw a flurry of international diplomatic agreements and conventions aimed at suppressing this trade, attended by government representatives and anti-trafficking activists alike. Indeed, “white slavery” was a particularly jurisgenerative category in the period 1899–1949, and historians are only beginning to scratch the surface as to why.

Jean Allain, for instance, has explored the legal history of the earliest anti-trafficking agreements signed by mostly European nations prior to the First World War, which held signatories responsible for implementing key anti-trafficking legislation in their jurisdictions, both national and imperial. These agreements, Allain argues, left plenty of room for interpretation and allowed signatories to water down many of its provisions.40As Allain highlights, the question of age of consent was central to the first transnational

anti-trafficking agreements. Diplomats debated at what age a girl or woman could have been said to have consented to commercial sex or migration (or both). Unsurprisingly, there were considerable national differences in attitudes to age of consent with regard to sex or movement, and disagreements over whether a woman over twenty-one could constitute a “victim” of trafficking nearly prevented the signing of the 1910 Convention.41 The discussions around age of consent in pre-war international meetings prefigured the League’s move toward seeing all forms of migratory sex work as trafficking, articulated in the 1933 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age. They also placed questions of women’s bodily autonomy and sexual maturity within a corpus of evolving international law concerning global governance, a theme that deserves more exploration in the historiography.

International legal debates did not only rest on which women were and were not included in the category “trafficked.” They also hinged on which territories were to be included and excluded from the space of “humanitarian” protection. Should colonies or dependent territories be included in international agreements about trafficking? Philippa Hetherington and Sonja Dolinsek have recently highlighted the centrality of the so-called colonial clause to debates about anti-trafficking international law in the middle of the twentieth century.42 First signalled in the 1904 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade, this clause gave colonial powers discretion to decide whether or not non-metropolitan spaces fell under the jurisdiction of the agreement. This clause would later appear in myriad other “administrative” agreements and even found its way into the 1951 Genocide Convention. The clause was not a purely academic matter. France’s colonial clause, which excluded French West Africa from its responsibilities under the 1904 Agreement and 1910 Convention, resulted in a comparatively open space for migratory sex work in those colonies, as Caroline Séquin elaborates in this special issue.

The study of anti-trafficking laws’ national effects has not lain fallow. Historians have continued to explore specific national legislation from within and without the context of internationalism and document how international and national law fed into policy and international policing in the early twentieth century and, as the edited collection from Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fisher-Tiné demonstrates, was entangled with the international policing of other forms of “vice.”43

Turning from law on paper to law as implemented on the ground, a number of recent histories explore the way that anti-trafficking laws have functioned as a way to surveil and control young, working-class women. This was particularly true during the height of the “white slavery” panic in the early twentieth century, which served as a warning to girls leaving

their homes and institutions and traveling independently for work. In some countries, these young women would be required to seek the permission of fathers and husbands in order to be given exit papers; in other countries they would find their points of embarkment and arrival heavily surveilled. Certain women, branded “undesirable migrants,” would be subject to denied entry or deportation.44 Often, steamship companies played critical roles in surveilling working-class female migrants, as enforcement of immigration policy was “off shored” in what Aristide Zolberg calls a form of “remote control.”45

As April Haynes points out, the links between “rescuing” victims of exploited prostitution and controlling working-class women’s labor pre-date the anti-trafficking movement. By the late nineteenth century, as her research has found, middle-class women who positioned themselves as “rescuers” of exploited prostitutes also ran for-profit employment agencies that worked to plug the significant domestic labor shortage in the expanding American West. They sought, in Haynes’s words, to shuttle vulnerable women “out of brothels and into kitchens.”46

The relationship between anti-trafficking organizations and the forced “retraining” of young women was a trend that continued throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, especially for those who sold sex or were forced to sell sex within their own country’s borders. In England, Ireland, India, and elsewhere, “rescued” domestic victims of exploited prostitution were put to work in institutional laundries for no pay.47 It was widely understood that “moral insanity”—that is, bad or precocious sexual behavior—rendered young women vulnerable to exploitation, and this “moral insanity” was defined along class and race lines. In the hands of influential religious and humanitarian organizations, anti-trafficking was a powerful tool to control the behavior of racialized and poor, young women in order to “save them from themselves.”48 Conveniently, those who were saved could be coercively redeployed to work as domestic servants in middle- class-homes or as cheap labor in other feminized industries. This practice was not considered trafficking, despite its many shared characteristics.

While anti-trafficking policies worked to manage female labor in the domestic and imperial context, they also operated as a form of border control. Migration restriction soon became the main way in which trafficking was policed and ostensibly “prevented.” Many historians have shown how “white slavery” and “trafficking” became a way to manage porous borders and empower early immigration bureaus and departments to surveil and police marginalized and racialized women (and the men branded as “traffickers” and “pimps”).49 In other places, this mobility control became an extension of imperial power within colonies, where the regulatory power of “regulationism” was replaced by an equally powerful set of criminal laws

and restrictions on free migration, and where trafficking was used as way of reifying racial hierarchies.50 Historians Eithne Luibhéid, Torrie Hester, Grace Peña Delgado, and others have also shown, in the case of the United States, how laws enacted in the name of anti-trafficking became in practice laws that were used far more broadly to control “undesirable” migration and police troublesome borders.51 Early twentieth-century campaigners and policy makers were never explicit about the fact that laws about trafficking were central pillars in wider systems of migration controls, and yet that they were is undeniable. Trafficking appears in these historical investigations as the “thin end of the wedge”: anti-trafficking laws were some of the first anti-migration laws modern states passed as they began to develop much broader policies of anti-immigration and carceral border control. In parallel to the way that the purported rescue of exploited prostitutes enabled middle-class women to find meaningful work and business opportunities, the recent work of Katherine Benton Cohen (and Eva Payne in this special issue) shows how anti-trafficking allowed women to move into civil service roles within the new bureaucracies of immigration control; and the work of David Petrucelli and Philippa Levine, for instance, demonstrates various ways in which narratives of “anti-trafficking” and women’s protection allowed women to forge new roles for themselves in modern police forces.52

In her scathing and oft-cited article, “The Truth About White Slavery,” published in the English Review in 1913, feminist Teresa Billington-Greig lambasted the proponents of the new White Slavery Act, passed in Britain the year before, which, in keeping with other early anti-trafficking laws, outlawed “controlling or directing the movement of a prostitute,” rather than referring to any particular presence of exploitation. “The law is of very little value in the underworld of sexual trading,” she wrote, “…the causes of this evil cannot be touched by law, however perfectly conceived, however perfectly administered…the more severe you make your deterrent punishment, the more cunning and subtilty you develop in those who have to evade it.”53 Historical scholarship has added evidence to this assertion. States and empires used the concept of trafficking as an important tool to control the mobility and labor of migrant workers, imperial subjects, and young, unmarried women. But in all cases, the application of ideas and laws about trafficking was a highly imperfect, localized, and negotiated practice that was resisted, at times successfully, by those who found themselves at the law’s sharp end.

Voice, Agency, Experience

In contested claims about the relative freedom of migrant sex work, who gets to decide who is “free”? As scholars of both contemporary and

historical sex work can attest, it is rarely sex workers themselves. And yet recent historical work—much of it building on decades of social histories of prostitution and migration—explores what it would mean to prioritize the voices of those who were assumed to have been trafficked. This scholarship often relies on police and court records as well as the testimony of migration officials, researchers, and interviewers for the League’s official inquiries. Using techniques of reading against the archival grain elaborated by postcolonial scholarship and recent work on Atlantic slavery, historians such as Elisa Camiscioli, Keeley Stauter-Halsted, Christina E. Firpo, and Kozma have highlighted the alternative picture of migrant sex work generated by the words of suspected “white slaves” themselves.54

These historians routinely note the way that women themselves articulated their activities in the sex industry as work, and their mobility as a form of labor migration, even if these articulations arrive to us in fragments, filtered through the records of authorities. Indeed, some of the most challenging and engaging questions in the study of intimate labor, trafficking, and women’s migration are those of voice, agency, and the archive of experience. Historians remain committed to the struggle to find evidence of individual “trafficked” women’s choices, experiences, and opinions in the past, and have developed creative and insightful ways of uncovering them.

What emerges from these studies is a picture of complex and clever negotiations with authorities who, while powerful and subjugating, were still not immune to the tactics of migrant women workers trying to make good in a global economy.55 For example, as Laite, Pliley, and Yarfitz show, women who had been labeled prostitutes frequently found ways to evade restrictions on their migration, particularly through the use of “marriages of convenience” to gain access to citizenship.56 Sometimes, as Camiscioli argues in her article about French women’s migration to Argentina in the interwar years, migrant sex workers would deploy trafficking narratives to navigate systems of state control, even as they were themselves aware of the limits of their own choices within overlapping contexts of labor and sexual exploitation.57 In her work on Poland and Eastern Europe, Stauter-Halstead explores the business of migrant prostitution and the way that it operated alongside (and often hidden within or nearly indistinguishable from) licit systems of brokered migration and employment agencies.58

The social history of trafficking seeks not only to recover the experiences of migrant women sex workers—it has also recently engaged with another arguably subaltern figure in the illicit sex trade: the pimp, trafficker, or migration agent. Those who engaged in moving people—especially women who sold sex—across international borders, did so in full knowledge of the limitations of state power and international policing. They deployed strings of aliases, changed their appearance, took complex travel routes, crossed

borders by foot, and used falsified documents.59 Perhaps most of all, they counted on the systematic and endemic corruption of authorities—especially police and immigration officials—who would look the other way if the right amount of money changed hands. There is widespread anecdotal evidence of this practice, although of course the most common recordkeepers of anti-trafficking (the police and immigration officials themselves) rarely documented such behavior, and even more rarely preserved it in the archival record.

While much important work on the social history of transnational sex has shed light on the lived experiences of migrant men and women, it is notable that the historiography on trafficking has yet to engage fully with the classic critiques of seeking voices (Gayatri Spivak), of essentializing agency (Walter Johnson), and of reifying the evidence of experience (Joan Scott).60 Despite nuanced readings such as those by Camiscioli and Laite, other scholars too often mobilize a police record or League researcher’s interview as the transparent “voice” of a trafficked woman, and eschew the ethical problems of ventriloquizing agency highlighted by a generation of postcolonial scholars.61 As the field moves away from a focus on Europe and towards the colonial world, this problem arguably becomes more acute, especially as, once again, certain voices are privileged in the archive over others.

Fortunately, recent explorations of the presence or absence of the ‘trafficked woman’ in the archive highlight the theme’s capacity for historiographic innovation. In her recent book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, Laite uses microhistory and family history to radically contextualize the life of a young woman who had been idealized as a victim of “white slavery” in 1910. Juxtaposing the narratives of multiple actors in Lydia Harvey’s case allows Laite to situate the case far beyond the victim framing that people placed upon her without downplaying the tragedy of Harvey’s life. In her PhD work and in her forthcoming book, Emily Alyssa Owens uses manumission and slavery records in New Orleans to explore the doubly marginalized lives of young, enslaved Black women in the city’s brothels and to document the way that they sometimes were able to use the complex palimpsest of legal codes to their marginal advantage. Owens’s work, perhaps more than any other cited, captures the complexities of freedom and unfreedom within the context of racialized sexual labor.62

In this special issue, Sandy F. Chang uses a paper trail of deportation to uncover the potential experiences and motivations of a Chinese woman in Malaysia’s sex trade in the 1930s, and Caroline Séquin scours the archive to trace the movements of a brothel keeper between France and West Africa in the same period.Both Chang and Séquin demonstrate the opportunities that come from moving beyond the metropolitan archive and drawing more

thoroughly on the historiographical innovations of imperial histories. All these case studies encourage us to think in complicated ways about what Camiscioli calls “coercion and choice” within intimate migrant labor and trafficking. Most of all, people, especially women, who were identified as trafficked, defied its narrow definitions of victimhood, consent, and criminality simply by living their lives as complex human beings. They moved in and out of licit and illicit work and legal and “illegal” migration routes, in and out of freedom and unfreedom, and also into and out of visibility in the historical record.

Trafficking, Labor, and Unfreedom

Ultimately, individual states, the League, and subsequently the United Nations, remained entrapped within a concept of “trafficking” that on the one hand broadly defined all prostitution as exploitative, and on the other, narrowly conceived of trafficking as a problem related solely to women’s prostitution. Twentieth-century discourse about trafficking was marked by a widespread aphasia about prostitution as work, and simultaneously struggled to articulate trafficking as a term that could be applied to nonsexual labor, including other forms of feminized intimate labor.

Historians have long pushed against these contemporary conceptual boundaries, and some of the newest scholarship on trafficking examines it as a discourse and a reality that was as deeply connected to ideas about labor. Peck’s scholarship has been instrumental in furthering this conversation. In his book Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West he explores the way that labor, especially migrant labor, was reconceptualized as “free” and “unfree” in order to police the boundaries of legitimate work and legitimate migration.63 These arguments, which echo Adam McKeown’s work on migration restrictions, offer a way to consider the gendered and sexualized discourse of “white slavery” and “trafficking” alongside broader conversations about exploited labor in all its forms: enslavement, indenture, and the myriad other kinds of abusive and coercive practices found in modern, capitalist labor structures that operated outside of these formal exploitative systems.64

Peck goes on in later work to suggest that while “white slavery” had its origin in conversations about white men’s labor exploitation, it became feminized and sexualized until it meant, almost exclusively, women’s prostitution.65 What Peck does not adequately consider, however, is the degree to which this new superficial meaning of “white slavery” masked what was in reality a wider discourse about women’s work. As Laite, Eileen Boris, Rodríguez García, and others have shown, discussions about trafficking within and outside the League of Nations and its associated

bodies routinely returned to the problems associated with women’s work as being closely correlated to their experiences of migrant prostitution and trafficking, particularly within domestic service and the entertainment industry.66 In short: organizations, and women themselves, routinely cited vulnerability and poor pay in these sectors as a leading cause of women turning to prostitution.

Indeed, when examined with any care, these sectors appeared to be rife with trafficking-like practices themselves: coerced migration, defraudment about working conditions, confiscated documents, exploitative and binding contracts, withheld pay, long hours, sexual harassment and assault, and termination without recourse to repatriation or support.67 Throughout the twentieth century, socialist feminists persistently demanded safe and decently paid work for women, but these demands only ever sat uncomfortably alongside policies on trafficking that sought to suppress and control the problem through criminalization and migration restrictions.68

As Boris shows in her recent book The Making of the Woman Worker, conversations about “sex trafficking” were happening alongside the creation of the “woman worker as a distinct category in law and social policy,” whether this was explicitly acknowledged or not. Prostitution was labeled “trafficking” amid a persistent exclusion of feminized forms of labor (paid and unpaid domestic service) from conversations about “decent” work.69 Indeed, it is striking and revealing, that prostitution was brought under the rubric of “decent work” (in order to exclude it) in 1949, but that domestic service was left out of these global labor standards until 2019.70

Today, the face of trafficking is changing once again, having been rebranded as “modern slavery” in US and UK policy-making circles, starting from around 2010, most clearly in the UK’s ‘Modern Slavery Act’ in 2015. The term is now in wide use amongst NGOs, internationalists, and national policy makers around the world. Some historians have responded positively to this rebranding, forming organizations such as Historians Against Slavery in order to add historical weight to contemporary campaigns, and drawing parallels—just as late Victorian anti-trafficking campaigners did—between the campaign to abolish chattel slavery in the eighteenth and ninetieth centuries, and the efforts to ‘abolish’ “modern slavery” today.71

Other historians, who are of course also “against slavery,” view the rebranding with significantly more cynical eyes. It is, they argue, a broken analogy, that draws on a highly problematic narrative of abolitionism, erases the history of Black suffering, and draws false parallels between American slavery—which was a legal, state-sanctioned system whose abolition was achieved by the repeal of laws—and “modern slavery”—which is a criminalized, transnational phenomenon whose repression is sought by passing laws and enacting carceral measures. “Modern slavery” as a concept and

legal system positions states and private corporations as the key arbiters of emancipation, and further cloaks their roles as exploiters and coercers themselves within licit systems of labor, border control, and, most strikingly, the prison system. “Modern slavery” presents an image of global, racialized, and gendered labor exploitation that can be tackled through regulatory and carceral frameworks, rather than through the abolition of the hyper-capitalist global labor system itself.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the analogy of “modern slavery” falls apart in the hands of historians who are familiar with the historical malleability of concepts of free and unfree labor and who intrinsically understand “work” as something that has entailed various degrees of exploitation, coercion, or unfreedom for the vast majority of people over the vast majority of history. For women in particular, the nexus of legal intimate, casual, and unpaid labor continues to underwrite their vulnerability to exploitation and trafficking; a social reality largely unaddressed by anti-trafficking policies, which continue to use migration law and criminal law to address this complex problem.

This Special Issue

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Women’s History all reflect on and build upon the rich scholarship that has emerged over the past thirty years on the question of “white slavery” and “trafficking.” They also connect this scholarship to other fields—both in terms of geographical focus and national historiographies, but also in terms of trafficking’s relationship to migration, law, racialization, and other forms of labor.

In her article “Deportation as Rescue: White Slaves, Women Reformers, and the US Bureau of Immigration,” Eva Payne reassesses the role of middle-class women anti-trafficking campaigners in developing the United States’ emerging immigration law and bureaucracy. Focusing on the doctor, feminist, and campaigner Kate Waller Barret in the years leading up to and just after the First World War, Payne uncovers the way that “white maternalist women’s organizations” worked with the federal government to reshape the public understanding of deportation “as a protective rather than punitive act.” This not only made it easier for the federal government to legitimate their new deportation policies, but also augmented the authority of feminist philanthropic organizations, who collaborated with the government “to police poor migrant women and women of color” in the name of their own protection, and of “national morality. “Through the story of Barret’s collaboration with the Immigration Bureau, Payne points to a moment which “wedded the nineteenth-century tradition of women’s rescue work to a state-based, carceral approach to migratory sexual labor,”

which set the “ideological foundations” that continues to determine antitrafficking policy in the present day.

Julia Martínez, writing about “The League of Nations, Prostitution, and the Deportation of Chinese Women from Interwar Manila,” examines the way that international ideas about “white slavery” were applied in the context of the American-influenced Philippines during the 1920s and 1930s. This translated, she argues, to the targeting of Chinese migrant women who worked in the capital’s sex trade. These women, Martínez observes, were “caught within a paradox, being documented by the League of Nations as passive victims, while in Manila newspapers, they were depicted as leading an ‘immoral’ life,” therefore rendering them deserving of punishment and deportation. These policies, developed in conversation with internationalists, American imperialists, and local authorities, were grafted onto wider policies of immigration control, which included deportation and the targeting of racialized and migrant women.

In her article “Intimate Itinerancy: Sex, Work, and Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya’s Brothel Economy, 1870s–1930s,” Sandy F. Chang uses the case of Lee Sam to illuminate the way that anti-trafficking played out on both the micro and macro levels. Lee Sam was a migrant Chinese woman who travelled across inter-colonial borders during East Asia’s “mobility revolution,” eventually working as a market and cash-crop gardener and it seems, helping manage a small brothel that catered to mostly migrant Chinese men working in Perak province’s tin mines, agricultural industry, and other areas of the imperial economy. Thanks to “seismic shifts” in the laws controlling commercial sex as Britain moved away from regulationism and toward policies of criminalization in its colonies in the interwar years, Lee Sam found herself imprisoned, deported, and banished for life from the colony. Through the story of Lee Sam, Chang uses the framing of “intimate labor” to examine how “itinerant Chinese women in the brothel industry emerge as labor migrants whose economic endeavors, from selling sex to serving drinks, were often imbued with moral implications in ways that challenged the agendas of the colonial state.”

Moving away from East Asia and the British Empire, Caroline Séquin’s article, “Marie Piquemal, the ‘Colonial Madam’: Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar” explores the way that French imperial authorities—alongside migrant French sex workers— helped determine and shape policies of racial segregation in Senegal’s sexual economy. The article follows the life of Marie Piquemal, who migrated to Dakar to work in a state-sanctioned brothel that catered to the city’s white clients. Despite the increasingly influential anti-trafficking movement, France had adopted legal clauses that meant that they were not obligated to apply anti-trafficking conventions in their colonies, in another excellent

example of the way that discourse on trafficking operated along tangled international, transnational, and imperial lines. As Séquin argues, women like Piquemal “capitalized on the commercialization of white women’s bodies” in an imperial context, and in so doing, contributed to “the hardening of racial boundaries in the French Empire.” Séquin’s article points to the way that the intimate labor of migrant prostitution helped to reify racial categories and explores the difficult reality of white sex workers’ active roles in this process.

Pamela Fuentes explores the way that “discourses of ‘trafficking’ were as much about the transnational entertainment industry as they were about the sex industry” in her article “‘White Slavery’ and Cabarets: Mexican Artists in Panama in the 1940s.” She uncovers how discourses of “white slavery,” which obsessed over the idealized victimhood of white women in the sex trade, made invisible the exploitation of brown-skinned women who worked in the supposedly “licit” entertainment industry. The moral panic over Mexican cabaret performers in Panama created ambiguous and binary cultural scripts, of women who were either ambitious or naïve, of women who were both threatened and threatening. Set against the backdrop of global shipping, proletarian male labor, and US militarism and occupation, concerns over “trafficking” in the context of 1940s Panama were complex, contradictory, and uninterested in the voices and experiences of the women workers themselves.

In “‘Everyone Dreams About Leaving’: Debates on Human Trafficking in State-Socialist Poland,” Anna Dobrowolska joins an emerging conversation about the history of trafficking and prostitution in the post-war era. She examines two sex trafficking scandals in the early 1970s and 1980s, in which women were found to be moving through the increasingly porous Iron Curtain to sell sex in Dubai and Italy. These scandals, Dobrowolska argues, were tied to much wider, and contextually dependent, narratives of moral and economic crisis. In exploring the way that concerns over “sex trafficking” became a political football between communist and conservative forces in late twentieth-century Poland, Dobrowolska shows “how seemingly outdated discourses of ‘white slavery’ could be reapplied to serve the purposes of the Cold War competition.” The women themselves, in contrast to the infantilizing narratives built around them, often saw migration and sexual labor as a means of meeting their own aspirations as consumers and workers in a more open world.

The special issue concludes with an article by Magaly Rodríguez García and Eileen Boris, which takes a longer view of trafficking in the twentieth century and explores it at the level of internationalism. In “(In) Decent Work: Sex and the ILO,” the authors “map the ragged contours of worker protection, criminalization, and moralism that has characterized

deliberation over sex work in the international sphere.” The ILO was, as Rodríguez García and Boris explain, instrumental in “generating knowledge about what counts as work and who is a worker.” In failing to take seriously the idea that sexual labor was work, the earlier phase of the ILO defined prostitution as a criminal activity beyond their purview. When at last attempts were made to account for labor in the global “sex sector,” the organization found itself embroiled in debates over their supposed support for the legalization of prostitution, which could not, argued opponents, be considered “decent work.” Crucially, the authors note, this exclusion from the framework of “decent work” was also extended to domestic service and other kinds of feminized, intimate labor. This “tension between intimate labor and the quest for decent work” continued to plague the ILO over the course of the long twentieth century, and is a tension that continues to inflect policy, law, and practice in the present day.

Together, these articles demonstrate the entangled, ambiguous, and contradictory nature of trafficking as a concept, and anti-trafficking as a social and political movement, over the course of the long twentieth century and beyond. They encourage us to think beyond the Euro-American framing of “white slavery” from the early twentieth century and to link histories of trafficking to histories of empire, racialization, globalization, migration, and more. Most of all, they consider selling sex as part of a wider economy of feminized and migrant intimate labor, whether the organizations defining it and the authorities policing it saw it that way or not.

Conclusion: A Useless Category?

While “trafficking” is sometimes a useful heuristic for historians, it is also a conceptual trap. Like queer historians who struggle to articulate the way that “homosexuality” existed and yet also did not exist before the concept was created, historians of “trafficking” must deploy terminology and concepts as semi-normative shorthand, even as we historicize the moment of their making and examine the way this naming created new social realities.72 The methodological and theoretical challenges are impossible to transcend, not least because they are embedded in the archives, where authorities, media, and the law labeled some people trafficked or “white slaves,” while others went unnamed, and unrecorded. Instead, we must work within these troubled categories and, as Marisa Fuentes puts it, read along the archive’s “bias grain” to recover the lived experiences of vulnerable and marginalized migrant people.73

The historical study of “trafficking” is now an established, rich, and diverse field. Over the past three decades, several prominent historiographical themes have emerged as we grapple with the “useless category” in which

we are working. Firstly, amid complex and interleaved meanings and practices, and relying on archives generated in the main by anti-trafficking campaigners and enforcers, historians of trafficking have struggled to articulate the relationship between the “myth” of “white slavery” and the reality of women’s often exploited work within increasingly global prostitution markets in the twentieth century. To what extent was “white slavery” a racialized moral panic, and to what extent was it a highly problematic name for a very real problem linked to women’s (and others’) sexual and economic exploitation? Over the years, historians have found new ways to articulate the spaces in between this useless binary, ably demonstrated by several of the articles in this special issue.

Secondly, historians have debated the role and the successes of feminism and the wider women’s movement within this late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century story. On the one hand, they have identified and recognized real achievements: in better protections for women and girls against sexual violence and abuse, in progressive conversations about the nature of consent, in demands—sometimes met—for more labor and political rights for women. For many early feminists, campaigns to abolish regulationism and trafficking were part of a wider campaign against the patriarchal biopower of the modern state, which nothing epitomized more clearly than the state regulation of prostitution.74 On the other hand, historians have also uncovered uncomfortable alliances between feminists and conservative, often religious, moral reform organizations, and show how anti-trafficking campaigns used coercive and punitive methods to achieve their aims and save young women as much “from themselves” as from their ostensible traffickers. Historians are not much convinced by the concept of “balance sheets,” but most historians of trafficking would likely agree that the assault on women’s rights and freedoms encouraged by many in the anti-trafficking movement certainly off-set any potential gains. Together, this historiography points to key moments which presaged what Elizabeth Bernstein famously labeled “carceral feminism,” which dominates antitrafficking discourse in the 21st century.75

Thirdly, historians have come to identify how trafficking played a major role in ushering in the much broader immigration restrictions that are so central to geopolitics in our current century. Those who study trafficking’s past recognize these processes as they continue in the present, where appeals to “end trafficking” or, more recently, “end modern slavery,” form a central part of the rhetoric of carceral border states as they enact new powers of deportation, visa refusal, border policing, and migrant detention. While much of this scholarship remains focused on European and American migration systems and experiences, new work—including in this special issue—is

bringing global majority perspectives into the frame. As these perspectives grow in number, the concept of “trafficking,” developed by western nations and internationalists against a backdrop of racialization, xenophobia, and colonization, will likely grow ever more useless still.

Finally, long before policy makers and media began to shift attention from ‘sex trafficking’ to labor trafficking, historians have identified “white slavery” and ‘the traffic in women’ as phenomena and concepts deeply related to women’s migrant, exploited, and intimate labor. This reality went largely unnamed—trafficking obscured as much if not more than it revealed—but through studies of women’s migration and women’s labor in domestic service, care work, and work in more formal sectors, historians have been able to contextualize the conditions under which women were rendered vulnerable to sexual and labor exploitation within prostitution. As the scholarship matures, it is clear that the history of trafficking further complicates the idea of “free” and “unfree” labor. This research helps us to understand the conceptual and structural links between trafficking and slavery, and contextualizes trafficking in the context of labor migrations in the Global South.76

Trafficking may be a useless—or at least an incredibly tricky—category of historical analysis, but it has nonetheless profoundly shaped our ideas about migration, gender, labor, sex and crime for a century or more. The term and criminal category continue to shape national and international responses to migration. At the vanguard of internationalism, and inherently transnational, trafficking’s ambiguity is the defining feature of its past, and this ambiguity has created messy social realities. Trafficking’s definition and its history remains largely uninterrogated in policy and law-making circles today, and media, politicians, and internationalists alike see trafficking as a naturalized, normative category rather than a discursive, tangly idea with a long and complex past. This may be one of the reasons that exploitative labor and the carceral anti-trafficking movement—the poison, and the supposed cure—both continue to have such a harmful effect on the lives of vulnerable migrants. This is surely one of the great ironies of trafficking’s present.

Notes

1For a related discussion from the perspective of social science, see Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Maria Cecilia Hwang, and Heather Ruth Lee, “What Is Human Trafficking? A Review Essay,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 4 (2012): 1015–29 and Janie Chuang, “Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law,” American Journal of International Law 108, no. 1 (2014): 606–49. 2Judith R Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Alain Corbin, Women for

Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Donna J. Guy, Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 3Donna J. Guy, White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead: The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health, and Progress in Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Guy, Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery 1870–1939 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982). See also Victor A. Mirelman, “The Jewish Community Versus Crime: The Case of White Slavery in Buenos Aires,” Jewish Social Studies 46, no. 2 (1984): 145–68. 4Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London: Routledge, 2003); Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). See also newer work from Paul Kramer, “The Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 366–404 and Christine Elizabeth Firpo, Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 5Anne Summers, “Which Women? What Europe? Josephine Butler and the International Abolitionist Federation,” History Workshop Journal 1, no. 62 (2006): 214–31. 6Malte Fuhrmann, “‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Galata-Pera (1870–1915),” History & Anthropology 21, no. 2 (June 2010): 159–72; Molly McGregor Watson, “The Trade in Women: ‘White Slavery’ and the French Nation, 1899–1939” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2000); Paul Knepper, “The ‘White Slave Trade’ and the Music Hall Affair in 1930s Malta,” Journal of Contemporary History 44, no. 2 (2009): 205–20; Petra de Vries, “‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation: The Dutch Campaign against the Traffic in Women in the Early Twentieth Century,” Social and Legal Studies 14, no. 22 (2005): 39–60; Rachael Attwood, “Stopping the Traffic: The National Vigilance Association and the International Fight against the ‘White Slave’ Trade (1899– c. 1909),” Women’s History Review 24, no. 3 (June 2015): 325–50; Rachael Attwood, “Vice beyond the Pale: Representing ‘White Slavery’ in Britain, c.1880– 1912” (Ph.D diss., University College London, 2013); Cecily Devereux, “‘The Maiden Tribute’ and the Rise of the White Slave in the Nineteenth Century: The Making of an Imperial Construct,” Victorian Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 1–23; Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992); Deborah Gorham, “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-Examined:Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 21, no. 3 (1978): 353–80. 7Jessica R. Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (2010): 90–113; Stephanie A. Limon-

celli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 8Kristofer Allerfeldt, “Marcus Braun and ‘White Slavery’: Shifting Perceptions of People Smuggling and Human Trafficking in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Global Slavery 4, no. 3 (2019): 343–71; Luis Álvarez-Castro, “Transatlantic Sex Trafficking and Imperial Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction: Trata de blancas (1889) and Carne importada (1891),” Hispanic Review 86, no. 1 (2018): 25–44; Rachael Attwood, “Lock Up Your Daughters! Male Activists, ‘Patriotic Domesticity’ and the Fight Against Sex Trafficking in England, 1880–1912,” Gender & History 27, no. 3 (November 2015); Attwood, “Stopping the Traffic”; Jo Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (London: Zed Books, 2010); Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Nora Glickman, “The Jewish White Slave Trade in Latin American Writings,” American Jewish Archives 34, no. 2 (1983): 178–89; Mara L. Keire, “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, 1907-1917,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 1 (2001): 5–41; Eric Olund, “Traffic in Souls: The ‘New Woman,’Whiteness and Mobile Self-Possession,” Cultural Geographies 16, no. 4 (2009): 485–504; Joyce Outshoorn, “The Political Debates on Prostitution and Trafficking of Women,” International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12, no. 1 (2005): 141–55; Rachel Schreiber, “Before Their Makers and Their Judges: Prostitutes and White Slaves in the Political Cartoons of the ‘Masses’ (New York, 1911–1917),” Feminist Studies 35, no. 1 (2009): 161–93; Julia Laite, “Justifiable Sensationalism,” Media History 20, no. 2 (April 2014): 126–45,; Gretchen Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New US Crusades against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2011): 64–87; Gretchen Soderlund, “Covering Urban Vice: The New York Times,” White Slavery,” and the Construction of Journalistic Knowledge,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 4 (2005): 438–60; Gretchen Soderlund, “The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Expose,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 2 (2011): 193–211. 9Gunther Peck, “White Slavery and Whiteness: A Transnational View of the Sources of Working-Class Radicalism and Racism.”Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1, 4 (2004): 41–64; and Gunther Peck, “Feminizing White Slavery in the United States: Marcus Braun and the Transnational Traffic in White Bodies, 1890–1910,”in Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 222–41. 10Jessica R. Pliley, “Protecting the Young and the Innocent: Age, Consent, and the Enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act,” in Childhood Slavery Before and After Emancipation, ed. Anne Mae Duane (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 156–76. 11Harald Fischer-Tiné, “‘White Women Degrading Themselves to the Lowest Depths’: European Networks of Prostitution and Colonial Anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880-1914,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 40, no. 2 (2003): 163–90; Philippa Levine, “‘A Multitude of Unchaste Women’: Prostitution in the British Empire,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (2004): 159–63; Álvarez-Castro, “Transatlantic Sex Trafficking and Imperial Anxiety.”

12Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in NineteenthCentury Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 13Attwood, “Vice beyond the Pale.” 14Elisa Camiscioli, “Black Migrants, White Slavery: Métissage in the Metropole and Beyond,” in Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 99–128; Kate Marsh, “‘La Nouvelle Activité des Trafiquants de Femmes’: France, Le Havre and the Politics of Trafficking, 1919–1939,” Contemporary European History 26, no. 1 (2017): 23–48; Mir Yarfitz, Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2019). 15Paul Knepper, “British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire,” British Journal of Criminology 47, no. 1 (2007): 61–79; Paul Knepper, “‘Jewish Trafficking’ and London Jews in the Age of Migration.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 6, no. 3 (2007): 239–56. 16Mir Yarfitz, Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2019). 17Julia Martínez, “A Female Slave Zone? Historical Constructions of Traffic in Asian Women,” in Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, ed. Jeff Flynn-Paul and Damien Alan Pargas (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 309–35; Francesca Biancani, Sex Work in Colonial Egypt Women, Modernity and the Global Economy (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Liat Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); Liat Kozma, “Women’s Migration for Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East and North Africa,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (2016): 93–113; Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Caroline Séquin, “Prostitution and the Policing of Race in the French Atlantic, 1848–1947” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2019). 18Julia Laite, “Traffickers and Pimps in the Era of White Slavery,” Past & Present 237, no. 1 (2017): 237–69; Mary Tin Yi Lui, “Saving Young Girls from Chinatown: White Slavery and Women’s Suffrage, 1910-1920,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 3 (2009): 393–417; Jenny Clegg, Fu Manchu and the ‘Yellow Peril’: The Making of a Racist Myth (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1994); Brian Donovan, “‘Yellow Slavery’ and Donaldina Cameron’s Mission,” in White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006),110-128. 19Nancy Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Philippa Hetherington, “‘The Highest Guardian of the Child’ International Criminology and the Russian Fight against Transnational Obscenity, 1885–1925,” Russian History 3, no. 3-4 (2016): 275–310; Sandy F. Chang, “Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migration to British Malaya, 1877–1940” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2020). See also Johanna S. Ransmeier, Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

20For more on intimate labor and women’s migration, see for instance, Eileen Boris, Making the Woman Worker Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 21 Olund, “Traffic in Souls: The ‘New Woman,’ Whiteness and Mobile SelfPossession,” Cultural Geographies 16, no. 4 (October 2009): 485–504. 22Attwood, “Stopping the Traffic”; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin Books, 1995); Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 23Daniel Gorman, “Empire, Internationalism, and the Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s,” Twentieth Century British History 19, no. 2 (2008): 186–216; Barbara Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Interwar Years; the League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880-1950, ed. Kevin Grant, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 54–79; Carol Miller, “‘Geneva–the Key to Equality’: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 2 (1994): 219–245. 24Katarina Leppänen, “Movement of Women: Trafficking in the Interwar Era,” Women’s Studies International Forum 30, no. 6 (2007): 523–33; Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking; Jeanne Morefield, “‘Families of Mankind’: British Liberty, League Internationalism, and the Traffic in Women and Children,” History of European Ideas 46, no. 5 (2020): 681–96; Pliley, “Claims to Protection”; Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women,” International Review of Social History 57 (2012), 97–128. 25Jean-Michel Chaumont, Magaly Rodríguez García, and Paul Servais, eds., Trafficking in Women 1924-1926: The Paul Kinsie Reports for the League of Nations Vol I (Geneva: United Nations Publications, 2017). 26Jean-Michel Chaumont, Le mythe de la traite des blanches: enquête sur la fabrication d’un fléau (Paris: La Decouverte, 2009); Jessica R. Pliley, “Ambivalent Abolitionist Legacies: The League of Nations’ Investigations into Sex Trafficking, 1927–1934,” in Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy, ed. Genevieve LeBaron, Jessica R. Pliley, and David W. Blight (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 97–118; Paul Knepper, “The Investigation into the Traffic in Women by the League of Nations: Sociological Jurisprudence as an International Social Project,” Law and History Review 34, no. 1 (2016): 45–73; Paul Knepper, “Measuring the Threat of Global Crime: Insights from Research by the League of Nations into the Traffic in Women” Criminology 50, no. 3 (2012): 777–809. 27Julia Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Women’s Labour Migration and Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Review of Social History 62, no. 1 (2017): 35–65; Report of the Special Body of Experts on the Traffic in Women and Children (Geneva: League of Nations, 1927). 28 Sonja Dolinsek and Philippa Hetherington, “Socialist Internationalism and Decolonizing Moralities in the UN Anti-Trafficking Regime, 1947–1954,” Journal of

the History of International Law/Revue d’histoire du droit international 21, no. 2 (2019): 212–38. See also, Elizabeth A. Faulkner, “Historical Evolution of the International Legal Responses to the Trafficking of Children: A Critique,” in The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking, ed. John Winterdyk and Jackie Jones (London: Springer, 2020), 79–95; Jo Doezema, “Who Gets to Choose? Coercion, Consent, and the UN Trafficking Protocol,” Gender & Development 10, no. 1 (2002): 20–27; E. Scully, “Pre-Cold War Traffic in Sexual Labor and Its Foes,” in Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 74–106. 29Stephen Legg, “The Life of Individuals as Well as of Nations”: International Law and the League of Nations’ Anti-Trafficking Governmentalities,” Leiden Journal of International Law 25, no. 3 (2012): 647–64. 30 See, for instance, Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, eds., Selling Sex in World Cities: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Torsten Feys, “Transoceanic Shipping, Mass Migration, and the Rise of Modern-Day International Border Controls: A Historiographical Appraisal,” Mobility in History: Yearbook of the Transnational Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility 7, no. 1 (2016): 151–62; Christiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market in South America,” International Review of Social History, 57 (2012): 129–60. In the historiography, “international” refers specifically to the activities of international organizations, “transnational” to exchanges between countries/empires beyond/outside “internationalism.” For an extended discussion of these terms, see Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 31Guy, White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead. See also Elisa Camiscioli, “La ‘traite des femmes,’ une histoire de migrations (France-Cuba, début du XXe siècle),” Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire, 51 (2020), 97–117. 32Chang, “Across the South Seas;” Martínez, “A Female Slave Zone?;” Susan Pederson, “The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy over “Child Slavery” in Hong Kong, 1917–1941,” Past & Present 171, no. 1 (May 2001): 161–83; Christina Firpo and Agathe Laroche Goscha, “La traite des femmes et des enfants dans le Vietnam colonial (1920–1940), Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire no. 120 (October 2013): 113–24; Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics; Philip Howell, “Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong,” Urban History 31, no. 2 (2004): 229–48; Chunghee Sarah Soh, “Women’s Sexual Labour and the State in Korean History,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (2004): 170–77; Yuki Fujime, “Japanese Feminism and Commercialized Sex: The Union of Militarism and Prohibitionism,” Social Science Japan Journal 9, no. 1 (2006): 33–50; Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2002); Chunghee Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 33Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

34Eva Payne, “Purifying the World: Americans and International Sexual Reform, 1865–1933” (PhD diss., Harvard, 2017); Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Gunther Peck, “Migrant Labor and Global Commons: Transnational Subjects, Visions, and Methods,” International Labor and Working-Class History 85 (Spring 2014): 118–37. 35Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria; Knepper, “The ‘White Slave Trade’”; Fuhrmann, “‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity”; Keely Stauter-Halsted, “Moral Panic and the Prostitute in Partitioned Poland: Middle-Class Respectability in Defense of the Modern Nation,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (2009): 557–81; Keely Stauter-Halsted, “Sex at the Border: Trafficking as a Migration Problem in Partitioned Poland,” in Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia, ed. Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, and Nicole Svobodny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 164–87. 36Philippa Hetherington, “Victims of the Social Temperament: Prostitution, Migration and the Traffic in Women from Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, 1885–1935” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014). 37Liat Kozma, “Regulated Brothels in Mandatory Syria and Lebanon: Between the Traffic in Women and the Permanent Mandate Commissions,” in The League of Nations and Social Issues, eds. Magaly Rodríguez García, David Rodogno and Liat Kozma (New York: The United Nations, 2016), 153–65; Stephen Legg, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages: The League of Nations Apparatus and the Scalar Sovereignty of the Government of India,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, 2 (2009) 234–53; Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 38Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology and American Law (New York: Garland, 1990); for an overview of the scholarship on England see Laura Lammasniemi, “Anti-White Slavery Legislation and its Legacies in England,” AntiTrafficking Review, no. 9 (2017): 64–76. 39Benedict Kingsburg, Nico Krisch and Richard B. Stewart, ‘The Emergence of Global Administrative Law,’ Law and Contemporary Problems 68, no. 3/4 (2005): 19–20. 40Jean Allain, “White Slave Traffic in International Law,” Journal of Trafficking and Human Exploitation 1, no. 1 (2017): 1–40. 41Allain, “White Slave Traffic.” 42Dolinsek and Hetherington, “Cold war and International Law.” 43Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds., Global AntiVice Activism, 1890–1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and ‘Immorality’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Laura Lammasniemi, “International Legislation on White Slavery and Anti-Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century,” in The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking, eds. John Winterdyk and Jackie Jones (London: Springer, 2020), 67–78; Pliley, Policing Sexuality; Jessica R. Pliley, “Vice Queens and White Slaves: The FBI’s Crackdown on Elite Brothel Madams in 1930s New York City,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 1 (2014): 137–167.

44See, for instance, Eithne Lubhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002). 45Aristide Zolberg, “The Archaeology of ‘Remote Control,’” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period, eds. Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron and Patrick Weil (New York: Berghahn books, 2003): 195–222; Yukari Takai, “Navigating Transpacific Passages: Steamship Companies, State Regulators, and Transshipment of Japanese in the Early-Twentieth-Century Pacific Northwest,” Journal of American Ethnic History 30, no. 3 (2011): 7–34; Ethan Blue, “Finding Margins on Borders: Shipping Firms and Immigration Control across Settler Space,”Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 5, no. 1 (2013): 1–2. 46April Haynes, Tender Traffic: Intimate Labors in the Early American Republic (unpublished manuscript); Andrew Urban, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 47Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000); Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 48Vicki Crinis, “Sex Trafficking to the Federated Malay States 1920–1940: From Migration for Prostitution to Victim or Criminal?,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48, no. 2 (2020): 296–318. 49Grace Peña Delgado, “Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903–1910,” The Western Historical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2012): 157–78; Pliley, Policing Sexuality; Marsh, “‘La Nouvelle Activité Des Trafiquants de Femmes’”; Elisa Camiscioli, Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migration, unpublished manuscript. 50Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports; Christelle Taraud, “La réglementation de la prostitution, instrument de domination raciale,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830-1962, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ounassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault (Paris: La Découverte, 2014), 416–18; Séquin, “Prostitution and the Policing of Race.” 51Grace Peña Delgado, “Border Control and Sexual Policing”; Torrie Hester, Deportation: The Origins of US Policy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 52Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); David Petruccelli, “Pimps, Prostitutes and Policewomen: The Polish Women Police and the International Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children between the World Wars,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2015): 333–50; Philippa Levine, “‘Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should’: Women Police in World War I,” Journal of Modern History 66, no. 1 (1994): 34–78; Eric Cimino, “On the Border Line of Tragedy: White Slavery, Moral Protection, and the Travelers’ Aid Society of New York, 1885-1917” (PhD diss., Stonybrook University, New York, 2012).

53Teresa Billington Greig, “The Truth about White Slavery,” The English Review June (1913): 1. 54See, for instance, Christina E. Firpo, Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). 55Catherine Christensen, “Mujeres Públicas: American Prostitutes in Baja California, 1910–1930,” Pacific Historical Review 82, no. 2 (2013): 215–47; Kazuhiro Oharazeki, Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1887–1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018); Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (London: Routledge, 2012); Cristiana Schettini, “Between Rio’s Red-Light District and the League of Nations: Immigrants and Sex Work in 1920s Rio de Janeiro,” International Review of Social History 62, special issue no. S25 (2017): 105–32. 56Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Basingstoke, Palgrave: 2011); Jessica R. Pliley, “Trafficked White Slaves and Misleading Marriages in the Campaigns against Sex Trafficking, 1885–1927,” Federal History 11 (April 2019): 60–82; Mir Yarfitz, “Uprooting the Seeds of Evil: Ezras Noschim and Jewish Marriage Regulation, Morality Certificates, and Degenerate Prostitute Mothers in 1930s Buenos Aires,” in The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone, eds. Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 55–80; Mir Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves, and Stille Chuppahs: Organized Prostitution and the Jews of Buenos Aires, 1890–1939” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2012). 57Elisa Camisicioli, “Coercion and Choice: The ‘Traffic in Women’ between France and Argentina in the Early Twentieth Century,” French Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (2019): 483–507. 58Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 59Julia Laite, “Traffickers and Pimps in the Era of White Slavery,” Past and Present 237, no. 1 (2017): 237–69. 60Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) 271–313; Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no.1 (2003): 113–124; Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no.4 (1991): 773–97. 61The critique of “ventriloquism of agency” comes especially from settler colonial studies. See Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (New York: Continuum Books, 1999). 62Emily Alyssa Owens, “Fantasies of Consent: Black Women’s Sexual Labor in 19th Century New Orleans” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2015). See also Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

63Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 64Adam McKeown, “How the Box Became Black: Brokers and the Creation of the Free Migrant,” Pacific Affairs 85 (2012), 21–46 and Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 65Gunther Peck, “Feminizing White Slavery in the United States.” 66Boris, Making the Woman Worker; Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women;” Julia Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis.” 67Magaly Rodríguez García, “Child Slavery, Sex Trafficking or Domestic Work? The League of Nations and Its Analysis of the Mui Tsai System,” in Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers, eds., Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 428–50; Cristiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market in South America,” International Review of Social History 57, Special Issue 20 (2012): 132–37. 68Elisa Camiscioli, “Trafficking Histories: Women’s Migration and Sexual Labor in the Early Twentieth Century,” Deportate, Esuli, Profughe. Rivista Telematica di Studi Sulla Memoria Femminile 40 (2019): 1–13; Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women,” International Review of Social History 57, no. 20 (2012): 97–128; Howell, Geographies of Regulation. 69Boris, Making the Woman Worker. 70Eileen Boris and Jennifer N. Fish, “‘Slaves No More’: Making Global Labour Standards for Domestic Works,” Feminist Studies 40, no. 2 (2014): 411–43. 71For a critical assessment of this changing discourse, see Joel Quirk, The AntiSlavery Project From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and James Brewer Stewart, eds. Human Bondage and Abolition: New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 72Carol S. Vance, “Innocence and Experience: Melodramatic Narratives of Sex Trafficking and Their Consequences for Law and Policy,” History of the Present 2, no. 2 (2012): 200–218. 73Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives. 74 Julia Ann Laite, “The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, Abolitionism, and Prostitution Law in Britain, 1915–1959,” Women’s History Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 207–23. 75 Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 1 (2010): 45–71; Elizabeth Bernstein, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

76Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Robin Chapdelaine, “Girl Pawns, Brides & Slaves,” Child Trafficking in Southeastern Nigeria, 1920s,” in Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration , eds. Elodie Razy, Marie Rodet, Robin Chapdelaine, Oluwole Coker, Kelly Duke-Bryant, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2016) 51–66 and Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021).