This chapter explores race and sexuality in three parts. After a preamble that explores uses and definitions of race both historically and by historians, the first part examines representations of race and sexuality in relation to the politics of race and sexuality, via such historical figures as Sarah Baartman, Josephine Baker, and Jane Nardal. The second part considers administrative and legal policies as well as forms of social control that were used to control sexuality along the colour line, with references to Cleopatra, legal codes such as the Code Noir, the Scottsboro affair, sex work, and sex talk in the Americas, West Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The third part considers a newer trend towards exploring the influences of love, family, community, and kinship networks upon discussions and experiences of sexuality and race, via examples such as the Signares of Senegal or the ballroom houses of Harlem. One of the points of this chapter is to show how histories of empires, and those of encounters between the Global North and the Global South, were also histories of sex and race.

This chapter provides a thematic overview of commercial sex across time and space. Each section seeks to identify continuities and shifts in the way people debated, policed, and practiced commercial sex. While the analysis focuses primarily on the modern period, the chapter starts in antiquity to discuss the gendered and hierarchical notions that different societies and groups have used to refer to the ‘flesh trade’. A second section deals with the regimes and actors that have sought to control, repress, regulate, or decriminalise/normalise the sale of sex at the local, national, and international levels. Where possible, the voices of women and men who traded physical sex for money or other benefits are included in the analysis. The bottom-up approach is further developed in sections three and four, which focus on the structure and working conditions of the sex trade and profile the sellers of sex, intermediaries, and clients. A concluding section reflects on stigma, an issue that seems to have remained constant in the long history of (female) prostitution, and on coercion and consent, concepts that can be regarded as typically modern.