This chapter tells the story of two of the most notorious and ambitious company efforts in nineteenth-century Brazil, which, taken together dispel the notion that the end of the “conciliation period” had produced any lasting government neutrality in relation to private enterprise. The Mucury Company, founded by liberal stalwart Teófilo Ottoni, faced unlikely competition from the new Associação Central de Colonização, a state-favored company established in Rio. While Ottoni incorporated agents and techniques from previous colonization efforts, devised his own indigenous appeasement policies, and successfully orchestrated migrations to his flagship colony of Filadelfia, the ACC focused solely on migrant recruitment, transport, and reception, and received ample government subsidies to guarantee shareholder dividends. The ACC quickly overtook Ottoni’s colono recruitment efforts thanks to the support of prime minister Olinda, who was attempting to counter international criticisms of Brazilian colonization and define pertinent regulatory frameworks while harboring distrust toward Ottoni’s political aims. While both companies eventually folded, they did so for different reasons. In turn, the regulations devised by Olinda in his engagement with them became landmark precedents for the era of mass migrations.

I explore the role of identity documents, including forgeries, in this chapter. I analyze the gendered social meanings attributed to passports, as well as the strategies of underage female migrants – the primary targets of the anti-trafficking crusade – in response to state surveillance. Young women were savvy actors in procuring and using forged papers. They stole or borrowed the birth certificates of older sisters, friends, and acquaintances to apply for passports, and they lied, often convincingly, to border control agents about their identity, profession, and final destination. This chapter also shows how the gendered identity of migrants and class-based notions of sexual respectability determined access to the passport, and how age- and gender-based restrictions on mobility prompted some women to resort to forgeries.

This chapter considers the repatriation of French women and girls in the midst of the moral panic of trafficking. Advocates for repatriation justified this protocol with reference to regulatory aims: protecting the vulnerable from exploitation, guarding borders against undesirables, and managing the sexual order of nations. International conventions and French national law designated the consulate as the body responsible for returning trafficking victims to France; by authorizing or denying repatriation, the consul functioned as a powerful agent of migration control. Consuls focused their efforts on trafficking victims while placing consenting prostitutes in a category apart, although in practice, this line was not so easy to draw. Vulnerability did not always track neatly with youthfulness, passivity, or moral purity. In addition, vulnerability occurred in a wide range of exploitative labor arrangements, including but not limited to prostitution.

This chapter attends to the uniquely French stakes of this global moral panic. Early twentieth-century anecdotes attested to the prevalence of French women in brothels overseas, along with the idea that they were the most desirable and best paid in the business. In addition, state-regulated prostitution began in Paris in 1802 and then proliferated across the world. Because most anti-trafficking activists believed that regulationism caused the traffic in women, they considered France a false ally in their crusade. French representatives at international anti-trafficking conventions, and later at the League of Nations, ardently defended state-sponsored prostitution and women’s freedom to migrate for opportunities in the sex industry abroad. They also acknowledged the legitimacy of male demand for prostitution, in stark contrast to Anglo-American anti-vice crusaders. Moreover, by recognizing women’s individual liberty to sell sex, they injected the thorny question of consent into an already contentious discussion. Both proponents and opponents of regulated prostitution battled to determine the terms of the trafficking debate. Respective notions of national character and sexual morality, as well as migration policy, followed along these lines.

This chapter reveals how ideological notions of French decadence, US sexual restraint, and Cuban moral regeneration shaped immigration law and anti-trafficking protocols. Undercover investigations and social scientific studies discovered a flood of European women, especially from France, migrating for work in prostitution. The same studies described the erotic cachet afforded to Frenchness, the global marketing of vice, and what exactly French women offered for sale. According to US and Cuban reformers, a debased European morality promoted these “undesirable” migrations. This premise bolstered exclusionary legislation passed in both countries, barring suspected prostitutes from crossing the border, along with traffickers and pimps. Thus the desire for undesirable women – and not the protection of trafficking victims – motivated immigration reform.

This chapter turns to the legendary “Road to Buenos Aires,” which was widely considered the most significant trafficking route of the era. This case study illustrates how both coercion and choice functioned in the discourse and practice of migratory prostitution. When French women made official statements to the police, they strategically employed themes common to the trafficking narrative, including coercion, victimhood, and abuse. Their personal correspondence with family, in contrast, expresses how moments of both exploitation and agency punctuated their lives. Letters describe tender ties with mothers, sisters, and goddaughters; how poverty and unhappiness marked their existence in France; the everyday trials of poor migrants abroad; and expressions of wonder at the first ocean crossing. The lives of French women oscillated between moments of profound vulnerability and perceived opportunity, as reflected in their experiences of migrating and selling sex.

Around the 1880s, the issue of “white slavery” – the ostensibly coerced prostitution of young women – first emerged as a moral problem of international concern. Social reformers, journalists, politicians, and the public debated whether migrant women involved in prostitution had been trafficked, or if they willingly left their homelands for work in the sex trade. I show that trafficking discourse, framed in terms of coercion, passivity, and gendered moral reform, conceals the migration story at the heart of these journeys: most importantly, the search for better paying work, but also the quest for adventure and self-discovery. However, agency and exploitation are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Migrants’ lives unfolded on the spectrum between coercion and choice, and in the interstices of illicit and licit economies. This book seeks to explain why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of global prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice. It offers a provocative account of France’s role in modern world history: as an exporter of the theory and practice of state-regulated prostitution; of purportedly French sexual practices; and desirable or undesirable French women migrants, depending on point of view.

We explore the inherently racialized premises of colonial–national modernity and of imperial and national archaeologies, juxtaposing them with the contradictions and fluidity inherent in “Greek” and “Israeli” identities. This is followed by a brief critique of the reductionist, and often self-serving, roll-out of ancient DNA studies and of their political co-optation.

This chapter highlights the crucial function of gender at its intersection with race in discourse about slavery and abolition. It takes two case studies of ‘white slavery’, which received substantial press coverage: the enslavement of Circassian women as concubines in the Ottoman Empire and ‘the white slavery panic’ about sex trafficking in the US.

This chapter traces the development of the anti-vice and good governance movements that eventually succeeded in securing the closure of Baltimore’s already ailing red-light districts in 1915. The most successful of Baltimore’s anti-vice movements had its origins in evangelical Christianity, but concerns over industrialization, urbanization, and women’s role in the changing economy ensured that it developed a diverse following. Women’s rights organizations, Progressive political reformers, and physician and public health advocates all focused on prostitution as a symbol of the perils of urbanization, economic inequality, and political corruption. The relationship between political reform and anti-vice reform eventually proved to be the most significant one, as reform Democratic and Republican victories in state elections ushered in a period of state support for anti-vice measures. Following the white slavery scare of the 1910s, Maryland’s governor appointed a new Police Board and a state-level anti-vice commission. The combined efforts of the Police Board and the Maryland Vice Commission would ultimately result in the closure of Baltimore’s formerly tolerated brothels.