A very un-English predicament: ‘The White Slave Traffic’ and the construction of national identity in the suffragist and socialist movements’ coverage of the 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Bill

In the era of globalization, the construction of national identity is a common problem faced by all multi-ethnic countries. Each country also takes various countermeasures in its own political and social environment. These policies and measures are not only based on the differences of different social conditions of different countries, but also have common and universal significance. Critical reflection and absorption of these experiences can provide some reference and reference value for the construction of Chinese national identity. This paper is based on Huntington's Who Are We? From the definition of American national characteristics, this paper analyzes the multiple challenges faced by American national characteristics and its future development trend, so as to get a further understanding of the crisis of national characteristics and the construction of Chinese national identity.

The current study investigates the relationships between essentialism, constructions of national identity, and responses toward Syrian refugees in Turkey. We draw upon the concept of essentialism, which refers to tendencies to view socially constructed categories such as race and gender as fixed, natural, strictly bounded, and informative about people’s characteristics. We extend this concept to national essentialism, which we define as beliefs that the nation is a fixed entity with clear and strict boundaries that defines the qualities of its members. We argue that such an essentialist way of thinking will predict tendencies to define a particular national identity such as Turkishness in a more exclusionary way, by emphasizing common ancestral and cultural roots, rather than by emphasizing civic bonds such as citizenship. Such an ethno-cultural construction of the national identity, in turn, is likely to feed into tendencies to exclude ethnically and culturally diverse immigrant populations within the society. We have collected data from a sample of 500 participants to test our proposed mediation model using structural equation modelling. Our analyses have shown that national essentialism predicts endorsement of an ethno-cultural construction of the Turkish national identity, which, in turn, predicts greater perceived threat posed by refugees, and greater support for anti-refugee policies. Endorsement of a civic construction of national identity does not play a mediating role in the model. Our study connects the literatures on essentialism and constructions of national identity to shed light on the psychological roots of public responses toward newcomers to societies such as refugees. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of our findings.

<p>The sense of national humiliation in China derives from a huge psychological gap between a glorious Empire and a peripheral nation-state which invaded by foreign imperialists in the 19th century and the early 20th century. This gap let Chinese people tend to define the period from 1840s to 1940s as the “Century of National Humiliation”. Although, Chinese people suffer a lot during this “Century”, direct experience and the meaning attached it are not the same. Apart from history itself, this thesis argues that narratives of national humiliation are significant in constructing China’s national identity. In this sense, it will focus on China’s humiliation narratives in different periods, and try to find out what kind of role Japan plays in the construction of China’s national identity. In the first place, this thesis will focus on the narratives of humiliation/victim in different periods of China since its popularization in 1915, and try to give a comprehensive picture of the origin and evolution of this narrative. More specifically, it will examine Chinese humiliation narratives in the following three main periods chronologically: the origins and evolution of “national humiliation” in the pre-1949 era, the absence of “national humiliation” from the 1950s to the 1980s, and the reinvention of “national humiliation” in the post-1989 era. It argues that the narratives of the national past help construct China’s identities in different periods with different meanings. In the second place, this thesis examines not only the discourse of humiliation per se, but also the role that Japan assumes in both victim narratives and the none-victim narratives, and will utilize a social “self/other” approach to analyze Japan’s role in the construction of Chinese national identity. Overall, looking back on Chinese humiliation narratives in three main periods, this thesis concludes that China's national humiliation discourse is an integral part of the shaping of national identity and Japan plays an important role in this process. It also finds out that there is no certain consistency in the interpretations of the national humiliation throughout the last 100 years in China. The national humiliation discourse had once disappeared in China during Mao’s era from 1950s to 1980s. However, whether humiliation discourse dominants Chinese civil society or not, the ruling governments always play an essential role in shaping the nation’s identity. Besides, Japan has been an indispensable “other” in China’s construction of national identity. The popularization and intensification of humiliation discourse in China have always associated with anti-Japanese sentiments. Therefore, in Chinese context, Japan always assumes the role as an “enemy” when the humiliation/victim narrative dominates the civil society.</p>

Reviewed by: Language and national identity: Comparing France and Sweden by Leigh Oakes Annette Harrison Language and national identity: Comparing France and Sweden. By Leigh Oakes. (IMPACT: Studies in language and society 13.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. x, 305. ISBN 1588111164. $100 (Hb). This revised presentation of Oakes’s 2000 dissertation, completed at the University of Melbourne, Australia, examines the role language plays in the construction of national identity. The study is organized around a comparison of French and Swedish national identities. First, a content analysis of social, historical, political, and economic data regarding the role of language in the construction of national identity in each of the countries is presented. Next, the author describes a survey that she conducted in the two countries. Her approach is multidisciplinary, though her analysis and explanations rely on a theoretical framework from the social psychology of language. Chs. 1–3 introduce concepts necessary to the analysis and interpretation of the data contained in following chapters: ethnicity, civic and ethnic nations, nationalism, and linguistic variation within an ethnolinguistic community. Next, topics associated with the social psychology of language are treated: language attitudes, language ideology and power relationships, social identity theory (SIT), and ethnolinguistic identity theory (ELIT). Ch. 4 provides a general perspective of language and national identity, including the concepts of linguistic consciousness, standardization, prescriptivism, language purism, and language myths. A historical overview of the emergence of each nation’s language and identity precedes a review of each nation’s attitudes to language change and spelling reform in the modern era. In the subsequent chapters, language and identity issues are described for each country in the context of the national, European, and global arenas. Here the framework of comparing and contrasting the situations in France and Sweden is particularly useful as the discussion touches on the different effects of various social, political, and economic decisions on the use and function of language as it pertains to the construction of national identity. Salient notions include that of ‘the Other’, linguistic and nonlinguistic boundaries, and convergence/divergence. The author demonstrates how both countries have made recourse alternately to regional minority groups and to immigrants as linguistic Others as necessary contradistinctions in order to form a national identity through language. Linguistic and nonlinguistic boundaries create social spaces in which language and identity may have different relationships to each other, resulting in phenomena such as the indirect use of language as a socially acceptable basis for discrimination, the use of language to resist forces of assimilation and globalization, or the possibility of language shift. Strategies for the construction of national identity have involved the nation’s convergence toward and/or divergence away from minority groups, European neighbors, and other countries on an international playing field, such as the United States. In Ch. 8, O describes the methodology for the construction of the questionnaire used in her survey of secondary school students in France and Sweden, and presents the series of hypotheses on which it was based. Her original hypothesis had predicted a high degree of national and linguistic consciousness in France, and this was borne out among the French students. But contrary to her expectations, she also found a high degree of national and linguistic consciousness among the Swedish students. Likewise, her findings concerning French and Swedish attitudes towards regional and immigrant languages were the reverse of what her hypothesis predicted. The final chapter contains a summary and evaluation of the book’s contents and suggestions for future research. One noteworthy conclusion is that the official rhetoric and actions by agents on the national level do not necessarily guide or coincide with the construction of national identity at the grassroots level. The value of O’s research lies in her unique comparison of the history of official policies and actions concerning language and national identity to the synchronic study of speakers at a grassroots level. This book will be appreciated by those with interests in the areas of language attitude studies, the effects of language standardization, the globalization of English, and more particularly by those monitoring linguistic pressures in Europe. [End Page 899] Annette Harrison University of California, Santa Barbara and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL...

Internal orientalism in America: W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South and the spatial construction of American national identity

The Rhetoric of Revelation:Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé Gretchen Soderlund (bio) In Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, their humanitarian work of 2009, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn recount their experience working as foreign correspondents in China after the Tiananmen Square protests and realizing for the first time that news media ignore the everyday realities of millions of women worldwide. From the perspective of journalists, the everyday abuses women around the world suffered were not newsworthy: "When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and sold into brothels, we didn't even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen in a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen to girls every day." 1 In this account, sex trafficking—a practice also commonly referred to as modern-day slavery, sex slavery, forced prostitution, and, in earlier periods, "white slavery"—is taken to be the paradigmatic case of gender violence ignored by journalists. Yet positing sex slavery as the exemplary media blind spot is curious when one considers the history of journalism on this topic. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western news media offered extensive coverage of white slavery, making claims about the severity and ubiquity of the practice that had far-reaching and questionable legislative effects. Had Kristof and WuDunn dug deeper, they would have discovered that the advent of humanitarian campaigns against sex trafficking and the rise of investigative journalism share an intertwined history. In fact, the press played a critical role in producing now-familiar narrative conventions and rhetorical tropes commonly used to depict sex trafficking, as well as establishing methods for gathering facts and arriving at conclusions about prostitution and sex slavery. While there may have been a dearth of news reports of sex trafficking in the decades immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union, stories of innocent women and girls held captive in prison-like brothels are not new. Rather, they have, in the last two decades, resurfaced as an object of journalistic attention. This article considers the phenomenon of the sex-trafficking expose´ at two moments, the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century, in order to gain some purchase on the relationship between journalistic coverage and the construction of sex trafficking as a practice viewed by many policymakers, feminists, and evangelicals as among the most urgent of global humanitarian issues. A central premise here is that sex trafficking is not so much discovered as it is created as an object of humanitarian action, law enforcement intervention, and human rights policy. Indeed, episodes of heightened concern over trafficking have historically [End Page 193] relied on textual assertions that involve a set of interpretations that give substance and meaning to a phenomenon not readily available to public view. To explore the cultural construction of sex slavery as an object of human rights and humanitarian intervention, this article will focus on three journalistic exposés that brought a great deal of public attention to sex trafficking: "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," William T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette series in 1885 on London's trade in virgins; "The Girls Next Door," Peter Landesman's 2004 New York Times Magazine piece on domestic trafficking; and Kristof's New York Times series from the same year on sex slavery in Poipet, Cambodia. Sex Trafficking as a Cultural Construction In the late nineteenth century, journalists, vigilance movements, and evangelical women activists established a set of images and associations—the enslaved prostitute, the prison-like brothel, the mercenary procurer, and the monstrous client—to describe the players involved in the phenomenon of white slavery. These associations were first popularized in 1880s England, but by the twentieth century's first decade they became deeply embedded in the Western imaginary such that even today the term "trafficking" (and, increasingly, "prostitution") connotes sexual enslavement, captive innocents, and mercenary villains. Yet despite the current ubiquity of mass and activist media productions equating trafficking with sexual slavery and identifying women and girls as its primary victims, sex trafficking...

Leslie J. Harris’s The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity is a brilliant and timely analysis of the white slavery controversy that dominated the turn of the twentieth-century United States, in which many citizens expressed fear that white women and girls were being deceived, trapped, and sold into prostitution. For Harris, “the controversy was not simply about protecting women and children; it was also about harnessing white womanhood to constitute national identity and belonging.” A scholar of rhetoric, Harris impressively argues this point through coining “the ‘mobile imagination,’” which “includes conceptions of who can move, how mobility occurs, and what meanings of mobility circulated.” The white slavery narrative’s valorization of white women’s reproduction, purity, and domesticity defined “moral” women as those who were passively in stasis—moved, but not mobile, “private, controlled, and protected.” Heavily racialized, white slavery rhetoric further illustrated mobile individuals in “wilderness settings,” such as “immigrants, Black Americans, and residents of colonized countries,” as barbaric, immoral threats to white women and “to the spatiotemporal status of the nation.” To elucidate this argument, Harris’s work then moves readers through space and time. It begins in the 1880s Northwoods of Wisconsin, where a sensational national controversy emerged: confounded by the presence of white women in the area, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and Wisconsin lawmakers erupted into debate as to whether they were “irredeemable whores or innocent victims” of prostitution. Chapter Two concentrates on the supposedly dangerous and depraved urban city—a rhetorical image which Harris asserts was rooted in nostalgia and fear “as the immigrant Other moved into the space.” White women in urban settings were warned to “avoid virtually all human connection,” solidifying the home as “the only safe place.” Chapter Five expands upon the white slavery narrative’s interaction with the immigrant Other through the lens of Yellow Peril, which vilified Chinatown as a threat to womanhood and nation and simultaneously magnified women’s suffrage efforts. Turning toward the national level, Chapters Three and Four reveal how efforts to combat white slavery manifested in public and discursive spaces. Wealthy reformers like John D. Rockefeller Jr., for instance, turned to “supposedly objective facts” to redeem both women and men engaged in the vice of prostitution, finding “a lack of proper domesticity” as a consistent cause. Yet these reformers consistently cast Black women as irredeemable counterparts and potential perpetrators of white slavery. Harris additionally analyzes the Mann Act, contending that it functioned to create a national community defined by its moral whiteness. The legislation, which secured funding for the founding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), also worked to constrain Black mobility and institutionalize a legal alternative to lynchings as a means of enforcing racialized and gendered fears surrounding Black men. The final chapter examines how white slavery narratives in Europe recast the controversy as a transnational problem. Similar to the Mann Act, the international 1910 white slave treaty reinforced nations’ identity through the protection of white women and concurrently constituted empire through the exploitation and regulation of colonized women. Harris’s invention of the mobile imagination brings fresh insights to scholarship on religious nationalism. The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity uncovers how narratives of chosenness were infused into the white slavery controversy and amplified by mobility. The chosen—redeemable white women—could be moved against their will and victimized by white slavery; at the same time, they had access to the potential for mobility (a marker of citizenship) but instead morally and responsibly chose stasis within the confines of the home. On the contrary, the unchosen—irredeemable women, white and otherwise—moved with unregulated and threatening agency; they were mobile, but their mobility did not constitute citizenship and instead required freedoms denied to protect the national project. The white slavery narrative’s elevation of the chosen as worthy of salvation reveals moral white womanhood as sacred. American religious historians may then ask about the role that certain Protestant eschatologies held within the controversy. Harris’s brief transnational turn also invites scholars to consider how American religious nationalism is informed by empire and opens space for a comparative analysis of the white slavery controversy. The breadth of Harris’s work, steering readers through the local, national, and transnational domains, positions it as an indispensable read for American Religious historians of varying approaches. The work is well-suited for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, especially benefiting those with an interest in religion, nationalism, and race in the Progressive Era.

Sex, Marriage, and State Surveillance of the Intimate in Progressive-Era America Kellie Wilson-Buford (bio) Jessica R. Pliley. Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 295pp. Notes on sources, notes, and index. $29.95. Erica J. Ryan. Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. xii + 220 pp. Notes and index. $69.50. Contributing to the growing literature on state surveillance of the intimate in U.S. history, Jessica R. Pliley and Erica J. Ryan reveal that policing women’s sexuality and protecting the sanctity of heterosexual monogamous marriage were central concerns of state officials and progressive reformers in the first half of the twentieth century. Where Pliley focuses on the Mann Act’s key role in transforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into a national investigative agency, Ryan zooms in on the 1920s to examine how the First Red Scare initiated an era of gender and sexual conformity. While both books are important contributions to the fields of the Progressive Era, immigration history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of marriage and the family, Red War on the Family is a more specialized must-read for anyone interested in the First Red Scare, discursive constructions of communism and Americanism in post–Russian Revolution America, and the formation of conservative political coalitions. Likewise, Policing Sexuality will appeal to legal historians, scholars of sex trafficking and prostitution, and anyone interested in the creation of the modern police state. Based on nearly 1,000 Mann Act cases from 1910 to 1941 and a wealth of other Bureau of Investigation files, Pliley persuasively argues that the expansion of the FBI in the early twentieth century into the nation’s premier police agency depended in large part on the passage of the Mann Act, the nation’s first anti–sex-trafficking law. The Mann Act criminalized the transport of women over state lines for prostitution or “any other immoral purposes.” Originally intended to protect white, native-born women from being seduced and sold [End Page 484] into sexual slavery, the Mann Act’s vague “any other immoral purpose” clause paved the way for the Bureau’s surveillance of women’s sexual behavior in brothels and the intimate spaces of their own bedrooms. Yet Bureau officials excluded most African American and immigrant women from the protections of the Mann Act, feeding into popular constructions of chastity and respectability as characteristics only white women could possess. By enforcing the Mann Act along decidedly gendered lines that protected the patriarchal nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and husbands’ sole rights to their wives’ sexual services, the Bureau helped normalize heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the bulwark of American stability and values amidst feminist, anticapitalist, and modernist challenges to the status quo. Discourses on sex trafficking emerged in the United States in the 1870s in the context of Chinese immigration and the disproportionate number of Chinese women working as prostitutes, or “yellow slaves,” in the West. Fearful of the influence “yellow slavery” might have on morals and institutions, missionaries and purity activists rescued “enslaved” Chinese prostitutes and agitated for legal reform that would bar the entry of Chinese immigrants into the country. Progressive journalist Dr. Kate C. Bushnell’s 1888 report for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) on sex-trafficking in Wisconsin lumber camps ignited panic among social-purity activists about white slavery. Uncovering evidence that foreign men working in the lumber camps were trafficking young American women, these activists packaged a “myth” of white slavery to the public, portraying sex-trafficking as a crime with specifically immigrant origins. The anti–white slavery movement did not gain full force until 1907, when the Immigration Bureau and Dillingham Commission investigated the amorphous white slavery problem in response to rumors that Chicago was the center of the trade. Investigators articulated a vision of white slavery that located vice and criminality in the bodies of poor, foreign-born women who constituted a disproportionate number of prostitutes in Chicago. Publicity surrounding the investigation fueled nativist concerns about the moral threat immigrants posed to American values and institutions. In...

This chapter explains the role of Shaolin kung fu novels and movies in the construction of a national identity among the Chinese people. Wuxia novels and kung fu movies produced in the twentieth century functioned as important vehicles for the maintenance and reinvention of nationhood. They served two purposes: retrieving traditional Chinese culture and constructing a modern Chinese national identity. As the cradle of Chan Buddhism and a centre of Chinese martial arts, Shaolin was regarded as a symbol of indigenous virtue and strength and therefore became a popular theme in novels and movies. Chinese novelists and movie producers used legendary Shaolin heroes and Shaolin kung fu to invent a cultural identity, and aided the construction of a collective modern national identity among the Chinese.

Gardenesque imagery in the representation of regional and national identity: the Cotswold garden of stone

ABSTRACTHistory is often deemed essential to the construction of national identity. However, the issue of how refugee communities construct their national identity and the image of their historical legacy via the teaching of history is an understudied one. As such, this study examines the role of history teaching in the construction of national identity in the context of Tibetan refugee schools in India. By employing critical discourse analysis of the primary-level social studies textbooks with a focus on power and representation, this paper analyses the key features of nation-building project of the Tibetan exiles, and how nation-building project manifests itself in the curricular and pedagogical practices of social studies education. The findings show presence of an overriding political and cultural agenda in the social studies textbooks. The paper argues that refugees and other communities in diaspora live in an unstable socio-political climate where the use of history for the construction of collective national identity is even more pertinent and urgent.

PurposeThis paper aims to test assumptions made in previous research about the consequences of an identity threat in the construction of national identity among minority populations in Latvia and to discover how their approach(es) to constructing national identity is (are) reflected in their attitudes and in organisations.Design/methodology/approachThe study applies a survey method and uses the original scale for measuring collectivistic attitudes according to various target groups and the original scale for measuring organisational culture along its task and relationship orientation. It also draws on social identity theory, self‐categorization theory and segmented assimilation theories.FindingsWhile the assumptions were not confirmed, it was found that the construction of national identity among minorities in Latvia does not follow the same path and that people with a mixed national identity have significantly lower collectivistic attitudes towards society. Yet, these attitudes are positively related to relationship orientation in organisations in all samples. We propose that while threats to identity have apparently diminished in Latvia in the last four years, the individual's approach to the formation of national identity still moderates his/her attachment to an organisation and support for organisational tasks.Research limitations/implicationsThe reliability of one of the scales – collectivistic attitudes towards peers – was low in all samples. Future studies should categorize more specific target groups and look for differences in the corresponding collectivistic attitudes across various cultural and national identity groups.Practical implicationsSupporting good interpersonal relationships in organisations sustains patriotic feelings among all its members, including those with distinct approaches to constructing a national identity, and can strengthen the individual's orientation towards organisational tasks.Originality/valueResearch on the outcomes of demographic diversity in organisations approaches the issue of nationality as a uni‐dimensional construct. The present paper discloses the formation of national identity by uncovering other possible composites of national identity besides nationality. This paper provides insight for managers, academics and students into the role of the construction of national identity in revealing employee attachment to their organisation.

Background. National identity is a dynamic phenomenon that is discursively constructed through use of various language means, including the pronoun “we.” Perception of a nation as a political community results in usage of the national we in specific contexts, while practical use of the national we in various discourses has an impact on construction and support of the national identity.Сontribution to the research field. This research sets the parameters of discursive construction of the Ukrainian national identity represented in the media texts through use of the national we.Purpose. The purpose of this article is to analyse the use of the national we that appeared in Ukrainian media texts in the year of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Study materials were selected from the articles published on The Ukrainian Week’s website during 2022.Methods. A descriptive method was used for this research as a part of the discourse analysis.Results. Semantic zones related to the discursive construction of the Ukrainian national identity using the national we were highlighted: 1) the need to understand one’s national identity; 2) national character (stereotypical Ukrainian); 3) physical measurement of existence of a nation (people and territories); 4) historical memory; 4) culture; 5) present; 6) future; 7) tasks to be solved for adequate existence of the nation. The important element of understanding the national uniqueness is determining one’s distinction from the enemy which, among other things, is verbalised through we — they opposition. The common past that determines the present and the future, and the tasks the Ukrainians face are mentioned more often than the other semantic zones.Discussion. In all semantic zones construction of the national we is affected by the colonial past of Ukraine and the necessity to resist the Russian imperial narratives and defend against the full-scale armed invasion of Russia. The direction for the research is to study the discursive construction of the Ukrainian national identity during ХХ–ХХІ centuries in the context of the postcolonial research trends using various language means.

This research brief explores the controversial history of the cherry tomato and analyzes its role in the construction of Israel's national identity. Since 2003, mentions of Israel having “invented” the cherry tomato have appeared in both Israeli and international media. However, such claims have sparked outrage on various blogs and websites, and questions have been raised about the veracity of Israel's claims—as well as about the true origin of the cherry tomato. I explore the history of the cherry tomato, tracing mentions of it from the Renaissance period to modern times. In addition, I clarify the assertions of Israeli scientists credited with the development of the cherry tomato—that their research transformed the cherry tomato into a commodity in the 1980s. Finally, I discuss the cherry tomato claim in light of the Israeli government's hasbara (Hebrew for “explanation”) efforts, which attempt to counter negative images of Israel in the international press. While much previous scholarship on food and nationalism has focused on the relationship between the cultivation, preparation, or consumption of a food and the construction of a national identity, the present work focuses on the relationship between the food's invention narrative and national identity. By transforming the cherry tomato into an embodiment of technological innovation, I argue that hasbara separates the cherry tomato from its essence as a food and co-opts it into a symbol of modernity and progress.

Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI, by Jessica R. Pliley. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. 293 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). Historians have not been kind to the 1910 Mann Act, which made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for prostitution any other immoral purpose. They have viewed it as an embarrassing remnant of Progressive-era sexual conservatism and nativism, a tool for the harassment of those holding radical political views, and a case study of the dangers of legislating morality. In Policing Sexuality, Jessica Pliley takes a more nuanced view of the Mann Act, the nation's first anti-sex trafficking law. Her beautifully written study brilliantly revises our understanding of its creation in the midst of social anxiety about immigration and new social freedoms for women; its implementation across decades of dramatically shifting sexual norms; and its uneven effects on women, including disobedient daughters, adulterous wives, professional sex workers, and victims of incest, rape, sexual assault, and sexual trafficking. Pliley begins by contextualizing the 1907 craze, which encompassed both sexual and racial hysteria and outrage over real incidents of captivity and sexual abuse of women. She traces white slavery fears to a nexus of British and American narratives about the sexual trafficking of Anglo women. She also details the relationship between state and federal regulation of prostitution and turn-of-the-century imperial projects. The late nineteenth-century Social Purity movement was outraged by state and military regulation of prostitution, and publicized the suffering of victimized women. Pliley explains the shifting meaning of white slavery terminology, from the as a foreign-born prostitute who must be quarantined, to a later understanding of the white slave as a white woman trafficked within the United States by foreign men. She details the investigative commissions that further formed the nation's white slavery narrative. These movements culminated in the passage of the Mann Act. Pliley explains the Act's constitutional ambiguities, the legal challenges that expanded its reach, and the ways that its investigations extended the manpower and purview of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI). What most distinguishes Pliley's work, however, is her sophisticated understanding of female sexual autonomy within a culture still bound by patriarchal legal structures derived from coverture. Drawing on classic works such as Carol Pateman's The Sexual Contract and more recent studies on marriage, citizenship and the state, Pliley analyzes the FBI's implementation of the Mann Act in light of the marriage contract--the idea that in return for economic support, men received exclusive rights to their wives' sexual services and reproductive labour. …