This article analyses the debate on trafficking and policies to combat the recruitment of persons for commercial sex within the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children of the League of Nations. Its main argument is that the Committee's governmental and non-governmental representatives engaged in what might be called a “moral recruitment of women”. This form of recruitment had a double purpose: to protect females from prostitution through the provision of “good employment”, and to repress intermediaries of prostitution by means of criminalization. Three elements of the Committee's internal debates and concrete actions will receive special attention. Firstly, the ideological framework (feminism, social purity, humanitarianism, abolitionism, regulationism, and/or class); secondly, the gender dynamics (differences of opinion between the Committee's male and female representatives); and thirdly the degree of gendering (construction or reinforcement of gender roles and relations).

This article explores the relationships between young European women who worked in the growing entertainment market in Argentine and Brazilian cities, and the many people who from time to time came under suspicion of exploiting them for prostitution. The international travels of young women with contracts to sing or dance in music halls, theatres, and cabarets provide a unique opportunity to reflect on some of the practices of labour intermediation. Fragments of their experiences were recorded by a number of Brazilian police investigations carried out in order to expel “undesirable” foreigners under the Foreigners Expulsion Act of 1907. Such sources shed light on the work arrangements that made it possible for young women to travel overseas. The article discusses how degrees of autonomy, violence, and exploitation in the artists’ work contracts were negotiated between parties at the time, especially by travelling young women whose social experiences shaped morally ambiguous identities as artists, prostitutes, and hired workers.

Since the late nineteenth century, job seeking has become increasingly linked to organizations and facilities that offer information on vacancies, offer placement services, or undertake recruiting. The present article focuses on how job placement became a concern for the emerging European welfare states, and how state-run systems of labour intermediation were established between 1880 and 1940. Even more important was the state's regulation of existing job placement practices, which resulted in a slow process of specialization, codification, and homogenization – in short, a slow process of normalization of practices at national levels. State labour exchanges thereby became the dominant reference point for seeking and finding work.

Temporary labour migration was one of the characteristic phenomena of human mobility in Europe during the twentieth century. The predominant answer in several European countries to the growing economic demand for an external labour supply on the one hand, and political demands to limit the numbers of foreign workers and to protect the native workforce from the competition of “cheap” migrant labour on the other, was a growing direct and active involvement of the nation state in regulatory efforts and recruitment operations abroad. Besides bureaucratic organizations on a national level, bilateral recruitment agreements – starting in their modern form in 1919 – became the most important tool to regulate labour migration between two countries. This article takes a look at the evolving system of bilaterally fixed migration relations in Europe and its implications for sending and receiving countries as well as for the labour migrants involved. It argues that the network of bilateral recruitment agreements provided controlled and selective migration channels in Europe between the 1950s and 1970s. These agreements installed and protected certain minimum standards to migrants and led to a general improvement of the rights and conditions offered to temporary labour migrants in Europe.

Labour brokerage and its salient role in the mobility of workers across borders in Asia has been the subject of recent debate on the continuing usefulness of intermediaries in labour mobility and migration processes. Some researchers believe that labour brokerage will decline with the expansion of migrant networks, resulting in reduced transaction costs and a better deal for migrant workers. From an economic standpoint, however, reliance on brokers does not appear to have a “use-by date” in south-east Asia. Labour brokers have played an important role in organizing and facilitating officially authorized migration, particularly during the contemporary period. They undertake marketing and recruitment tasks, finance migrant workers’ travel, and enable transnational labour migration to take place. Consequently, both sending and destination states have been able to concentrate on their role as regulatory “agencies”, managing migration and ensuring compliance with state regulatory standards and providing labour protection. Private recruitment firms have simultaneously focused on handling the actual recruitment and placement of migrant workers. Notwithstanding this, the division of responsibilities in the migration regimes has also led to uncontrolled migration and necessitated intervention by the state during both periods. These interventions mirror the ethos of the times and are essential for understanding past and present political environments and transnational labour migration in south-east Asia.