chapter 28 Prostitution and Colonial Relations Liat Kozma Colonial encounters played a significant role in shaping policies and desires in both Europe’s colonies and in Europe itself, and thus they deserve their own thematic overview. I define colonial relations as ethnic or racial-based hierarchies and segregations which developed as a consequence of western imperial expansion. These were unequal power relations in which the colonizer had control over, or at least attempted to control, residential choices, mobility in public space and across borders, and who wedded and bedded with whom. I thus follow Ann Stoler’s contention that the very intimate domain of desire was shaped by these colonial interactions.1 Historical research on prostitution and colonialism is relatively recent. The argument historians present is that colonial domination and colonial power relations affected prostitution on multiple levels. First, the migration of women for prostitution to, between, from, and within Europe’s colonies was facilitated, encouraged, or restricted by colonial authorities. Second, colonial urban planning segregated colonizers from colonized, industrial from residential, and respectability from vice. Such segregations did not mean, of course, that different social groups did not interact or even live together. It means, however, that questions of racial and class interactions were central to the colonial vision of the city. These policies, in turn, affected the urban geography of prostitution, its interaction with the city’s inhabitants, and divisions within brothels or prostitutes’ quarters. Furthermore, the permanent and temporary migration of men—as soldiers, sailors, or industrial workers—created highly gender-imbalanced environments, and prostitutes were the only women officially allowed in some of them.2 1 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989), pp. 134–161; Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies”, The Journal of American History, 88 (2001), pp. 829–865. 2 Raelene Frances, “Prostitution: The Age of Empire”, in Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier (eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (Oxford, 2011), pp. 145–170; Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the © Liat Kozma, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_029 Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND license. Downloaded from 4.0 Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 731 The processes and categories of regulation—of prostitutes, brothels, and red-light districts—were not unique to the colonial context, and they are outlined in detail in the other urban and thematic overviews. What I try to do here is examine the specificities of colonial contexts and the various levels of power relations between the state and its subjects as well as between individuals on different sides of ethnic or racial hierarchic divides. Sources Sources for precolonial periods are often very rare or non-existent because many colonized societies were predominantly illiterate or because records were not preserved. Hammad and Biancani’s work on Cairo is able to reconstruct the precolonial history of prostitution because in Islamic Cairo decrees, chronicles and court records were kept.3 This was not the case for colonial Nairobi or Lagos, for which very little information is available. Some colonial cities discussed here, such as Singapore, Casablanca, and Nairobi, were not urban centres or did not exist at all before the colonial encounter, and thus only provide a roughly century-long historical survey.4 Sources for the colonial period were produced mostly by the colonizers. Historians of prostitution in these societies therefore use sources written by colonial administrators or imperial voluntary organizations who sought to civilize indigenous populations, combat global prostitution, salvage colonial reputation, and/or mitigate the flaws of colonial rule. Ekpootu’s research on colonial Nigeria, for instance, relies mainly on colonial police records and administrative correspondence. Similarly, Tracol-Huynh’s article on Hanoi notes that most available sources on prostitution are French and that French writings about Vietnamese women were imbued with stereotypes of their race and sex.5 Empire (Cambridge, 2009); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in The British Empire (New York, 2003); Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis, 2009); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990). 3 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo. 4 Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Precolonial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Kozma, this volume, Casablanca. 5 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Tracol-Huyn, this volume, Hanoi. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 732 Kozma Indeed, in most historical societies the life stories of the women in prostitution are often mediated through those who tried to reform, regulate, or discipline them. In colonial contexts, notably, such mediation is further extenuated by racial divisions and colonial power relations. So, those who wrote about prostitutes and recorded their life stories did not share these women’s language, and, as I demonstrate below, often held specific assumptions about the sexuality of non-European women. Sexuality and Colonial Relations Colonial relations were often metaphorically depicted as sexual encounters, be it the “virgin African continent”,6 or the likes of Kuchuk Hanem, the dancer who fascinated Flaubert in his mid-nineteenth century visit to Egypt and became a metaphor of the colonial coveting gaze in Edward Said’s Orientalism.7 Consequently, colonized women themselves became an object of colonial sexual fantasy, curiosity, and gaze. In certain cases, such as Kenya or India, the colonized woman was perceived as exotic and hypersexual.8 In other cases, such as Islamic societies, women’s sexuality was perceived, by definition, to be oppressed, and Muslim women were to be saved by colonial authorities or benevolent voluntary organizations. Such metaphors were translated into colonial erotic imagery, both at home and in the colonies themselves: erotic representations of the colonized, and sexual fantasies of the colonizer.9 Colonial policies in regulating and policing prostitution are best understood within a conceptual framework mindful of the role of desire and sexuality in shaping colonial relations. On the one hand, Ann Stoler has shown how the intimate domain of human interactions was central to colonial policies. British colonial officers, for example, were not allowed to age in the colonies so that imperial prestige would not be questioned by the sight of an elderly Englishman. English and Dutch youth in the colonies were sent to boarding schools in Europe, so that affection toward their childhood nannies or desire toward indigenous girls would not undermine well-kept distinctions between colonizers and colonized. The policies that ensued from these anxieties differed 6 7 8 9 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), pp. 186–190. Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”. See, for example, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995); Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, 1986). Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 733 in different imperial contexts. All, however, saw interracial sexual relations or the potential for such relations as a matter fit for state intervention.10 In several colonial contexts, such as the Dutch Indies or Singapore, concubinage and the existence of “mixed-blood” children were perceived as a threat to colonial power and prestige and were strongly discouraged. Much earlier than the Dutch and the French, Herzog argues, the British created policies preventing interracial relations and marriage, and they were outlawed throughout the Empire already at the end of the eighteenth century.11 On the other hand, as Franz Fanon has famously argued, colonial relations also produced and channelled desire itself. White men’s access to colonized women had distinctly different cultural meanings and different histories from colonized men’s desire for white women. The former was sometimes banned, but sometimes encouraged by colonial authorities, for example by operating indigenous brothels to cater to the “needs” of occupying armies or colonial administrations. The desire of indigenous or non-white men for white women, Fanon argued, was created and nurtured by colonial relations and anti-colonial sentiment. The colonized, he stated, desired that which belonged to the colonizer: to sit at the settler’s table and to sleep in the settler’s bed, “preferably with his wife.” The political desire to take the place of the colonizer and reverse power relations is translated here into sexual desire.12 A black man’s desire, in turn, was translated into colonial or white anxieties about the uncontrollable sexuality of the colonized. This can be seen, for example, in French colonial policies toward its colonial soldiers, both oversees and in France itself. Similar concerns influenced highly racially-segregated societies, for example the American South of the Jim Crow era.13 Women’s sexual desires are rarely part of this paradigm. They were deemed irrelevant in colonial discourses, and were rarely discussed when describing relations between prostitutes and their patrons. European reformers and officials described white women merely as victims of “white slavery” (to be described below) or as victims of deception which led them into interracial 10 11 12 13 Stoler, Sex and the Education of Desire, pp. 137–164; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies (Princeton, 2009), pp. 57–104. Herzog, this volume, Singapore. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 2004), p. 5; see also his book Black Skin, White Masks (London, 2008). On sexual anxieties and racial violence in the American south, see for example Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-Emancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2000), and on African-American masculinity in the Jim Crow era, see Marlon Bryan Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York, 2004). Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 734 Kozma intimacy or even marriage. Female desire within colonial relations is therefore not a part of my explanatory framework, and although it surely deserves its own theoretical discussion, unfortunately it is beyond the scope of this paper.14 To summarize, colonial regimes of regulation differed from those in the metropolis by incorporating racial assumptions about sexuality into everyday policies of rule. Imperial and/or racial prestige affected policy and this was implemented in the most intimate domains of human interactions. Indigenous Sexuality and Early Colonial Encounters For many precolonial societies, we know little about how colonial encounters affected patterns of non-marital or commercial sex. Very schematically, historical research points to at least three categories of precolonial sexual/ commercial practices: first, prostitution, or a phenomenon that closely resembled it (as in Vietnam and the Islamic world); second, an exchange of sex for money, the cultural connotations of which were different enough from prostitution to be considered as something else (such as Indian temple prostitution or North African courtesans); and third, societies in which there was no prostitution as the society had little or no money/wage labour, and therefore there was no exchange of sex for money (as, for example, in Nairobi). A fourth category might be distinguished as cases in which we have no information at all, due to a lack of sources. All were transformed in the period of colonial control. In Latin America, for example, we know that there were sexual encounters between Spanish and Portuguese men and local women that were either encouraged or tolerated by the colonial authorities. Little historical research, however, is available on commercial sex here.15 As early as 1538 the Spanish Crown granted the municipal authority of Mexico City a permit to operate a properly supervised “concubinary house” to service Spanish men, but it is unknown whether such a house was indeed opened at that point. Spanish 14 15 On North African soldiers in the French army, see for example Ethan M. Orwin, “Of Couscous and Control: The Bureau of Muslim Soldier Affairs and the Crisis of French Colonialism”, The Historian 70 (2008), pp. 263–284, 272; Glenford D. Howe, “Military-Civilian Intercourse, Prostitution and Venereal Disease Among Black West Indian Soldiers During World War i”, The Journal of Caribbean History, 31 (1997), pp. 88–102. See, for example, Asuncion Lavrin (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln, 1989); the more recent book by Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500–1600 (Albuquerque, 2005); Asunción Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Spanish America”, in Jose C. Moya (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History (New York, 2011), pp. 132–152. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 735 men, sent to rule over a non-Christian population, left their women and children behind. Sexual relations with indigenous women became acceptable, and these women sometimes resorted to selling their bodies as a means of survival. It is difficult to determine which such relations were indeed commercial, since all non-marital sex was similarly referred to as “life in sin”. Women known to be leading such a life were banned from leaving their houses when dressed up glamorously, riding in carriages, or bringing cushions or rugs to church. It was only in the eighteenth century that prostitutes and pimps were legally identified, punished, and imprisoned.16 Until the 1830s, the East Indian Company was wary of allowing European women into India, fearful it might destabilize the company’s relationship with India’s rulers. As a consequence, British men entered into concubinal or marital relations with Indian women. The British authorities, however, became increasingly intolerant toward such relations. By the late eighteenth century, persons of mixed race were excluded from holding political or military office with the company. At about the same time, venereal diseases came to be defined as a medical problem which threatened the wellbeing of British soldiers and officers. Low-class prostitutes who were found to be diseased were confined to a lock hospital and segregated from society until cured. The regulation system was designed to ensure that soldiers had access to sex while being protected from venereal diseases. In different times and places, such access was regulated along ethnic or racial lines, while in others it was not. In any case, white men’s access to non-white women was more acceptable than non-white men’s access to white women.17 In some cases, traditions of public entertainers, some of whom were engaged in occasional prostitution, disappeared with the colonial encounter. The women engaged in such professions were eroticized, sexualized, and then integrated into a system of regulated prostitution. In precolonial Vietnam, for example, legislators condemned prostitution but did not try to punish prostitutes. Colonial legislation replaced precolonial forms of non-marital sex and institutionalized commercial prostitution.18 In Egypt, alongside prostitutes there were singing and dancing women who would perform for upper-class 16 17 18 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City. Erica Wald, “From Begums and Bibis to Abandoned Females and Idle Women: Sexual Relationships, Venereal Disease and the Redefinition of Prostitution in Early NineteenthCentury India”, Indian Economic Social History Review, 46 (2009), pp. 5–25; Judy Whitehead, “Bodies Clean and Unclean: Prostitution, Sanitary Legislation, and Respectable Femininity in Colonial North India”, Gender & History, 7 (1995), pp. 41–63. Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 736 Kozma families and they were known for their refinement and style. In the nineteenth century, with the influx of European tourists to Egypt, they came to be confused with prostitutes and their title, ʽawalim, became synonymous with prostitution.19 Similarly, women of the Ouled Naïl tribe, who served as professional dancers, concubines, and courtesans in precolonial Algeria, came to be classified as prostitutes; the name of the tribe itself came to be synonymous with prostitution. Their traditional dance was turned into an erotic tourist attraction which also featured in orientalist fantasy and imagery of colonial Algeria. In precolonial Algeria, these women were socially acceptable and could go on to marry. In colonial Algeria, they were branded as prostitutes, both legally and socially.20 Similarly, in colonial India the category of prostitution was extended to women whose activities had not been previously classified as criminal or immoral, particularly courtesans. These were women who lived and entertained in salons which came to be known as centres of music and culture. They also provided sexual services to a limited upper-class clientele. As the Indian court centres lost their standing with the strengthening of the East India Company, the women lost their former support, and their role came to be restricted solely to the sexual sphere. These women were transformed from trusted companions into medical threats. The Indian woman alone, rather than her sexual partners, was singled out as a transmitter of venereal diseases. Temple prostitution and traditional dance, both containing a sexual component, were also classified by the British as prostitution. In earlier periods, British officials distinguished between these categories of women and bazar prostitutes, but these distinctions later disappeared and these women’s social and religious functions were erased.21 In Yoruba communities in Nigeria, a wife could take a lover who secured her husband’s approval by paying a fine and performing culturally-approved rites. European writers, and later European administrators, Ekpootu argues, eroticized non-erotic practices and represented as socially deviant what had been culturally legitimate. The colonial economic system introduced new economic 19 20 21 John Rodenbeck, “ʻAwalim; or, The Persistence of Error”, in Jill Edwards (ed.), Historians in Cairo: Essays in Honor of George Scanlon (Cairo, 2002); Karin van Nieuwkerk, “A Trade like Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin, 1995), pp. 33–36. Barkahoum Ferhati, “La danseause prostitutée dite ‘Ouled Naïl’, entre mythe et réalité (1830–1962): Des rapports sociaux et des pratiques concretes”, clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire, 17 (2003), pp. 101–113; Barkahoum Ferhati, “Enquête sur la prostitution en Algérie: Souvenirs de Bou-Saâda”, L’Année du Maghreb, 6 (2010), pp. 253–268. Wald, “From Begums and Bibis”. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 737 relations within families and communities. Colonial policies were also affected by the Victorian gender ethos which favoured men and devalued women’s labour and relegated women to the domestic sphere, marginalizing them economically. Migration of males within the colony also resulted in an increase in female-headed households, thus feminizing poverty and driving some women to prostitution as a means of supporting their families. Some were driven to the city where they hoped to find opportunities, as village life offered little.22 The legacy of slavery and abolition is also present in some of our case studies. European powers had a complicated and ambiguous relationship with slavery. Until the early to mid-nineteenth century most colonial powers enjoyed the cheap labour provided by existing systems of slavery, sometimes incorporating them into capitalist expansion. Britain was the first to ban slavery in its colonies in the 1830s, and others followed, sometimes substituting it with other forms of bonded labour.23 The abolition of slavery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created new realities. Men and women could no longer legally be purchased, for example in Lagos, Casablanca, or in Cairo, and abolition gave rise to other forms of exchange and employment. In some of these localities, manumitted slaves, who had nowhere to go and little support within the community, had little choice but to resort to prostitution. In late nineteenth century Egypt, for example, references to manumitted slaves in brothels suggest such a predicament. The British authorities established homes for manumitted slaves with the declared aim of directing those women to domestic labour rather than prostitution.24 Urban Spaces The history of prostitution is predominantly an urban one, and the colonial context is no exception. Here, histories of colonial prostitution are intimately linked to histories of colonial urbanism in terms of how colonial authorities chose to construct and transform urban spaces. Historians of prostitution in 22 23 24 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria. See, for example, Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (Oxford, 2007); Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge, 2000); Marcel van der Linden (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: The Long-Term Consequences of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Leiden, 2011). Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge, 1985), p. 174; Diane Robinson-Dunn, The Harem, Slavery and British Imperial Culture: Anglo-Muslim Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 2006), pp. 84–85. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 738 Kozma colonial societies connect the transformation of prostitution to the transformations of urban space brought about by the colonial presence. In the passage cited below, Fanon famously demonstrated the effects of colonial relations on how urban spaces were experienced by both colonizer and colonized: The settler’s town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are paved with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown, and hardly thought about… The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners. The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs.25 Colonial urbanism was a modernizing project in the sense that it relegated urban planning to experts who relied on supposedly impartial social science to generate objective criteria and techniques often termed “colonial laboratories”. Europe’s colonies were territories in which methods could be implemented, tried out, modified, and improved if necessary.26 Colonial urbanism was colonial in relying on unofficial zoning and de facto class- and race-based segregation and inequalities. Colonial cities segregated the respectable from vice, indigenous from the foreign, and lower-class from upper-class clientele. These districts were monitored by a system of gates and walls, as well as curtains and glazed windows.27 In Johannesburg, for example, the 1923 Act removed black people from the city’s centres and settled them on the outskirts of the city. 25 26 27 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 38–39. See for example, Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, 2007). Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991), pp. 3–11; Christabelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc: 1830–1962 (Paris, 2003), p. 85. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 739 In Shanghai, the various international concessions and the Chinese town had different prostitution regulations (and practices) and in Nairobi, blacks were confined to certain neighbourhoods.28 In North Africa, colonial urbanism entailed opening up the old city and making it more accessible to colonial policing; the gates which divided urban quarters after nightfall, for example, were removed. The winding alleyways and the rooftops which one could easily use for escape were most problematic in maintaining law and order. In addition, colonial authorities constructed new quarters adjacent to the old one, implementing rational principles of visibility and accessibility: standardized buildings, wide boulevards, and segregation between residential and industrial regions. The tramway, and later the bus, also facilitated mobility within the city and necessitated urban planning which made it possible for these vehicles to move around the city.29 The geography of prostitution in colonized urban spaces was marked by the complex relationship between settlers’ and indigenous neighbourhoods, or between the indigenous city and the colonial city which developed around it. Postcolonial cities often bear the mark of this bifurcated past to this day. Colonial cities marked an unequal encounter between different social and economic systems, one imposed upon the other, causing social and economic ruptures and dislocations. These, in turn, created economic instability which drove women to prostitution. These processes supplemented, rather than replaced, traditional modes of control and supervision of women with modern, bureaucratized ones.30 In the various case studies discussed in this volume, the colonial presence affected the geography of prostitution in several important ways. First, the colonial administration transformed urban geographies either by creating new urban centres or transforming existing ones. Nairobi and Casablanca are two examples of small towns/villages which became administrative colonial centres, thus attracting both European and local immigrants in search of skilled or unskilled jobs.31 In some urban localities, this created a gender imbalance: male labour was much more in demand in these new or growing urban centres 28 29 30 31 Ziyad Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg: From 1886 to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai. Taraud, La prostitution coloniale, pp. 81–83. Ibid., pp. 11–13; Wright, The Politics of Design; Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (London, 2004). Chacha, ”An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 740 Kozma than female labour, and female migration was either discouraged or actively banned. As Ekpootu demonstrates, colonial Lagos became a colonial administrative centre and colonial capitalist development attracted indigenous migratory flows in response to perceived opportunities. These migratory flows, in turn, changed Lagos into a commercial centre.32 Nairobi provides an example of the effects of the monetization of a traditional economy and the dislocation of social and familial relations following colonial intervention which drove families to poverty and women to prostitution. Nairobi became an administrative and commercial centre during the colonial period. Mining camps, military settlements, and port cities attracted commercial prostitution to their predominantly male environments. The colonial administration prohibited wives from joining their husbands at the workplace. Culturally, moreover, it was not acceptable for respectable women to abandon their lands and move to the city as dependents with their husbands. In non-colonial situations it was the presence of western settlements or armies, such as in nineteenth-century Shanghai and early twentieth-century Istanbul, that attracted the migration of prostitutes and pimps.33 Singapore changed from a small fishing village into the centre of British colonial rule and British influence in the region, thus creating both supply and demand for prostitution. Herzog shows that although trafficking in women and the slave trade were illegal in British territories, in Singapore the British authorities ignored the import of non-European women, mainly from neighbouring islands, because it reduced the gender imbalance and provided both domestic and sexual labour that was sought after by sailors, merchants and soldiers. As Singapore grew, these were joined by voluntary migration as well.34 Johannesburg’s existence and growth were related to the imperialist expansion of capital and the discovery of gold. In the early twentieth century, it was inhabited mainly by men, as black women’s entry to the city was restricted. Consequently, it attracted both African and eastern European prostitutes and trafficking.35 Commercial sex arrived in Australia with the first European colonizers who set up a convict colony in Sydney in 1788. Some of them had been selling sex in Great Britain before being deported to Australia. Aboriginal women who were dispossessed from their land and from their traditional economies also provided sex to the colonizers in exchange for money, food, or alcohol. European settlement in Australia also attracted southern and eastern European immigrants, 32 33 34 35 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria. Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”. Herzog, this volume, Singapore. Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 741 including prostitutes. These served men in the new townships and mining districts, which like in Nigeria and Johannesburg, were composed mainly of men.36 In other places, urban development contributed to the growth of particular cities and with them the development of a middle class with a dispensable income, which increased the demand for leisure and pleasure opportunities for the male bourgeoisie. In Hanoi, the growing city offered an easier life, a standard of living that was better than in the countryside, and anonymity, and thus it attracted many young women from rural areas.37 Regulation The regulation of prostitution in colonized societies was often related to the presence of colonial military forces. So while regimes of regulation were increasingly criticized or abolished in Europe, regulation was imposed on colonized societies, first and foremost in order to protect colonial soldiers from venereal diseases, which could be, until the beginning of the twentieth century, fatal. The debilitating effects of syphilis on the military made regulation appear to be a viable tool even after medical advancements improved the quality of care and thus the chances of recovery.38 In the case of Singapore, Herzog claims that even when it was clear that the medical regulation of prostitution was not effective, regulatory measures were maintained because they served a secondary goal of maintaining order and supervising the conduct of both prostitutes and soldiers.39 More generally, controversial medical practices were maintained in the colonies because they made it possible for colonial authorities to protect their soldiers and settlers from disease while at the same time monitoring and regulating interracial sexual encounters. Actual policies and practices varied between and 36 37 38 39 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth. Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi. See, for example, Michelle K. Rhoades, “Renegotiating French Masculinity: Medicine and Venereal Disease during the Great War”, French Historical Studies, 29 (2006), pp. 293–327; Laura Doan, “Sex Education and the Great War Soldier: A Queer Analysis of the Practice of ‘Hetero’ Sex”, Journal of British Studies, 51 (2012), pp. 641–663; Mary Louise Roberts, “The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944–1946”, 115 (2010), pp. 1002–1030; Glenford D. Howe, “Military-Civilian Intercourse, Prostitution and Venereal Disease Among Black West Indian Soldiers During World War i”, Journal of Caribbean History, 31 (1997), pp. 88–118. Herzog, this volume, Singapore. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 742 Kozma within different empires. Britain, for example, had abolished formal regulation in Britain already in 1886 and in Singapore two years later. It did, however, impose regulation on Egypt in 1883 and on Iraq in 1921, while regulating prostitution in Palestine for only a couple of years after World War i. The French, on the other hand, abolished regulation at home only in 1946 and their regulation regimes in the colonies faced very little domestic criticism. Such differences can be ascribed to both imperial considerations and to circumstances on the ground, which comparative studies are now beginning to unravel.40 The abolition of licensed brothels, at home and throughout the empire, was one of the causes that British and French women organized around before they obtained the right to vote. In Britain, Josephine Butler led a successful campaign against the contagious disease act.41 In France, abolitionist campaigns began in the 1870s and enjoyed only partial success until the official closing of licensed brothels in 1946. French regulationists justified the persistence of licensed houses in both France and the colonies in terms of a “need” to find a legitimate sexual outlet for colonized men who would otherwise prey on “respectable” women. Abolitionists, for their part, maintained that regulated brothels undermined men’s respect for respectable French women. They likewise described the operation of licensed brothels in the colonies as a betrayal of the sacred trust of civilization. Reserved quarters, such as in Casablanca or Saigon, particularly embarrassed French reformers.42 Colonial regulation policies included regular medical examinations, restrictions on prostitutes’ residential choices, the establishment of state-controlled brothels and at times red-light districts or designated quarters, and controlling such women’s mobility not only within urban spaces but also nationally and globally. Colonial rule introduced a new language of hygiene and public order as well as new bureaucratic apparatuses to enforce it. Colonial rule also introduced and codified new anxieties about miscegenation and the different sexuality of the colonized. These also relied on specific assumptions about masculinity, especially that of young soldiers. Sexual intercourse was seen as 40 41 42 Three notable examples are Howell, Geographies of Regulation; Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Stephanie A. Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford, 2010). Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994), pp. 127–170. Julia Christine Scriven Miller, “The ‘Romance of Regulation’: The Movement against StateRegulated Prostitution in France, 1871–1946” (Unpublished Ph.D., New York University, 2000), pp. 361–446. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 743 a biological necessity, and abstinence was unthinkable for young men when they were away from their wives or were still single; masturbation or homosexuality were frowned upon and this left prostitution as the only option.43 As a result, while regulated prostitution had been losing ground in Britain since the 1880s and increasingly throughout continental Europe in the following decades, it was perceived as being indispensable in the colonies. On the one hand, colonial troops had to be protected. On the other hand, indigenous prostitutes could not be trusted to care for their own health without compulsory supervision. Again, the question of interracial sex, and then of the fraternization of colonial soldiers and administrators with indigenous men at the same brothels, required strict regulation and segregationist policies. The centrality of colonial armies in policies regarding prostitutes is demonstrated through those policies that targeted the spread of venereal diseases; in Hanoi, if it was determined that a man had a venereal disease he was required to report the prostitute who infected him to the vice squad, and she could then be punished. The authorities sought mainly to regulate those women who were in contact with Europeans. Although regulation was applied only to prostitutes, artists and concubines were in some cases also under various kinds of supervision, with varying levels of success.44 In Singapore, the Contagious Disease Act was repealed in 1888 after a long struggle between state authorities and social reformers who saw these acts as state-sponsored prostitution and an affront to British morality. Pressure from London further prevented the reinstatement of the Act. Singapore’s officials, however, devised new ways of monitoring and regulating commercial sex.45 As stated above, in Egypt and in Iraq the controversy over the cda in Britain itself did not prevent the authorities from regulating prostitution in both localities. Racial Hierarchies Colonial prostitution, like colonial urban policies in general, relied on spatial segregation and legalized hierarchies between different populations. These could be simple dichotomous relations between colonizers and colonized, such as Europeans and non-Europeans, as was for instance the case in Cairo 43 44 45 Rhoades, “Renegotiating French Masculinity”, pp. 293–327; Doan, “Sex Education and the Great War Soldier”, pp. 641–663. Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi. Hertzog, this volume, Singapore. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 744 Kozma and Casablanca.46 These hierarchies were more complex or nuanced in Nairobi and Johannesburg, as Asians, Indians, and “coloured” constituted a third category.47 Such hierarchies could determine who would be subjected to regulatory measures and who would not; where one was allowed to reside; whether a woman was subjected to medical examinations at a public clinic or could consult a private physician; how much she was allowed to charge; who she was allowed to have sex with; and, to what extent she could turn to the police for assistance. In Singapore, sex workers were divided by class and ethnicity; different ethnic groups inhabited different parts of the city and those were divided by class as well.48 In South Africa, European and black prostitutes were treated differently. Black prostitution was less of a concern in colonial and independent South Africa, as long as black prostitutes stayed in “native locations” and did not cross the colour line. It was not prostitution or black prostitution as such that were state concerns, but rather interracial sex: at first only non-marital sex, and later also interracial marriage.49 These considerations did not have equal importance for British and French authorities. Whereas the French did not discourage the migration of French prostitutes to their colonies, the British strictly banned the migration of British prostitutes, while permitting the prostitution of other white women. As Tambe argues, the presence of eastern European Jewish women in Indian brothels served Britain’s dual purpose of supplying its soldiers with women who were “white enough” but not endangering its imperial reputation as these women were considered “non-quite-white”; colonial officials emphasized the Jewish background of these women, and thus from their perspective, respect for the empire was left intact as Indian men were not exposed to British prostitutes and had no opportunity to frequent them.50 In Singapore as well, the immigration of eastern and central European women was encouraged, while the immigration of British prostitutes was banned.51 The legal status of white women often differed from non-white women, just as the status of immigrant women differed from that of indigenous women. In different colonial settings, the division was not clear-cut; mixed-blood or 46 47 48 49 50 51 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo. Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”; Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”. Herzog, this volume, Singapore. Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”. Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. 57–67. Herzog, this volume, Singapore. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 745 mulatta women could be classified as white, non-white, or in-between, according to the context. These divisions, moreover, played on colonial male fantasies and on scientific assumptions about racial difference. In Vietnam, the colonial authorities saw Vietnamese prostitutes as dirty and dangerous, whereas Japanese women were considered to be medically safer and Chinese women were somewhere in the middle. European prostitutes, moreover, were considered to be a bad example of European behaviour, especially since they could be “bought” by Vietnamese men. In Vietnam, eastern European prostitutes had the privilege of being able to get private medical examinations.52 Colonial regulation also meant that colonized women were treated differently than European women. Levine notes, for example, that in Britain itself women were registered after being arrested while the colonial assumption was that Indian women would register voluntarily because prostitution was not shameful in Indian culture. The colonial authorities also considered physical contact with colonized women to be a form of contamination that threatened to orientalise and degenerate British soldiers.53 White slavery was also a concept that European empires employed in attempts to understand and later regulate the prostitution of white women in the colonies. It was Victor Hugo who coined the term “white slavery” in the 1870s to designate the denigration of French women in state-licensed brothels in France itself. In later decades, however, it was used to describe the kidnapping and trafficking of young women overseas such as English girls in the brothels of Brussels or Jewish women in Buenos Aires. The very existence and scope of such a trade has been controversial from the early days of the twentieth century up through present-day historical debates; it is clear that women migrated to work in prostitution and it is also clear that violence and deception were involved in some of these cases and that women were often much more vulnerable in foreign lands than at home. The controversy lies in the extent of coercion vs. consent involved, both in the past and present. In the colonial context, these concerns were intimately related to imperial honour and prestige, as outlined above. The ability of the Empire to protect European girls and to a lesser extent indigenous girls from being trafficked and coerced into prostitution was a matter of state policy with regards to limiting the migration of unaccompanied women to colonial possessions and restricting admission to licensed brothels. These concerns were taken up in the 1920s by the League of Nations’ Committee on Traffic in Women and Children. Both 52 53 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi. Philippa Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India”, Journal of the History Sexuality, 4 (1994), pp. 579–602. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access 746 Kozma Britain and France were represented in the committee and adhered to the relevant international conventions, but they were very hesitant to adhere on behalf of their colonial and mandatory possessions, and this was critiqued by international women’s organizations as well as some of the members of the committee, especially the Danish feminist Valentine Dannevig.54 The question of white slavery or trafficking in women and children as it was later called was related to the presence of white prostitutes abroad, both in Europe and overseas. In the colonies, as Chacha demonstrates, the presence of white women was supposed to civilize the colony by encouraging white men to adopt normative standards of respectability.55 White prostitutes, on the other hand, had the potential to reduce the reputation of the empire in the eyes of the colonized. Conclusion The current overview first examined how colonial expansion affected the global geography of prostitution. The formation of colonial outposts and capitalist enterprises attracted migratory populations and with them the urban development of prostitution. Thus, communities of migrants from the countryside, in addition to European women and migrants from neighbouring regions or settlements, came into being throughout the colonized world. The regulation of prostitution and commercial forms of exchange replaced a variety of former prostitutional practices which disappeared in places like India and North Africa. Colonial policies also affected urban spaces, leading to the creation of walled brothel districts where there had been none, and some of those urban layouts outlasted colonial rule. Prostitution in colonial settings differed from prostitution in the metropolis in several important respects. One was racial segregation which is common, in one degree or another, to all colonial contexts. Another was colonial armies, the presence of which dictated policies, regulations, and practices. Yet another 54 55 On the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, see Jessica 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 (2010), pp. 90–113; Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women”, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 97–128; Katarina Leppänen, “International Reorganisation and Traffic In Women: Venues of Vulnerability and Resistance”, Lychnos (2006), pp. 110–128. Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access Prostitution and Colonial Relations 747 characteristic was the marginal effect that the indigenous population had on regulation policies, which were decided by colonial authorities with little regard for the population’s needs or concerns. Alongside these commonalities, this paper highlighted several important differences. French authorities were more likely to regulate prostitution than British ones, and Spanish colonialism tended to tolerate interracial sex more than the British model. Also, official red-light districts were more characteristic of French colonial cities than their British counterparts. An explanation for these differences cannot be offered in this overview, as that would require more thorough research in colonial archives. Such research would also be able to address questions that urban overviews situated in specific urban settings cannot address about inter- and intra-colonial influences. We know that policies in the colonies and medical knowledge acquired in colonial hospitals affected policies in the metropole but the multiple ways they did so are subjects beyond the scope of this volume that demand further research. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:50:31PM via free access