International crime in the interwar period: a view from the edge

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.

Virtually all historical research on immigrants and crime concerns domestic crime. Questions about immigrants and international (or transnational) crime have been left largely unexplored. Important work on domestic crime appeared from 1880 to 1945, including the efforts of the Dillingham and Wickersham Commission. Other early analyses concerned immigrant involvement in the white slave trade (human trafficking), anarchist violence (terrorism) and drug trafficking. The League of Nations carried out important research using undercover researchers and developing concepts such as the “international underworld.” Private organizations such as the Bureau of Social Hygiene and the International Narcotic Education Association played a vital role as well. Although historical research does not generate the same sorts of policy recommendations as social science research, historical knowledge makes an essential contribution to the understanding of ethnicity, crime, and immigration.

In 1912, the well-established Parisian painter Paul Chabas exhibited Matin e de Septembre (hereafter September Morn) a painting he had been working on over three summers at the prestigious Salon des Artistes Fran ais. Three years earlier, the forty-year-old Chabas had asked an eleven-year-old girl from the French Savoie to pose for him in Lake Annecy as the morning sun warmed its glacial waters. Over the past twenty years, images of children even hinting at voyeuristic pleasure have been regarded as suspect. Since most paedophiles have been found to possess such images, they are considered inextricably imbricated in the epidemic of child sexual abuse that James Kincaid calls 'the culture of child molesting'. Current child-abuse studies reveal that in the lack of an object, paedophiles may gratify themselves with fantasies triggered by an illustration, and then may be spurred on to seek real equivalents to the image. This connection drawn between child imagery and paedophilia is not new French physicians were documenting it as early as 1860. Amid comparable moral panic ignited by French natalists over the 'white slave trade' and girl-child pornography before the First World War, picturing the body before the age of sexual consent became the subject of vehement protest, extensive legislation, and vigorous prosecution. Yet, unlike the fate of Henson and Mapplethorpe's photography, art by 'official artists' that fetishised the child's body, as epitomised by Chabas, was, and arguably remains, untouchable. Why this happened and continues to happen is the subject of this paper. This article will question why the specious body-concealing gestures deployed by Chabas, together with his nature setting, appeared to inscribe this thirteen-year old as a naturally innocent 'moral girl'. It will question how these signifiers of innocence were able to function as misleading pretexts and, indeed, camouflaging covers for paedophilic eroticism. Drawing upon neurological and sexological discourses, it will also question why eroticism was heightened by the fetishisation of innocence. As there is a lack of a comparable strategy of dissimulation and fetishisation in Henson's 'N', the final question to be addressed will be whether this very absence lies at the heart of the Henson scandal. To unravel the conditions from which these questions arise, this article will, firstly, investigate the 'white slave trade', the child-pornography postcard trade, and pornography legislation in Belle poque Paris. Secondly, it will examine the natalist discourses on 'moral girls' and their healthy bodies, in relationship to Chabas' paintings of pubescent girls exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Fran ais and those by his contemporary, Francis Aubertin, at the Salon de la Soci t National des Beaux-Arts. Thirdly, it will trace the forensic, neurological, and sexological research into child sexual abuse and the sexual life of the child, together with the diverging discourses on children's fantasy. Fourthly, it will consider how the female child's identity became binarised by these debates into either a 'fille fatale' or a 'moral girl'. To address this, it will ascertain, with the aid of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and Henry Krips's scrutiny of fetishisation, which image may be closest to the pornography of 'filles fatales': Henson's photograph of 'N' or Chabas' so-called 'moral girl'.

It is estimated that around 27 million people today are living in conditions similar to that of slavery and human trafficking has become a global industry worth $ 12 billion a year. It is even more baffling to note that twice as many people are enslaved today than during the days of the African slave trade. How can that be and what exactly is human trafficking? Human trafficking can be described as the forced movement of people for purposes of labour, such as prostitution and other kinds of work, including domestic work. If one looks at the history of the term ‘trafficking’ it can be traced back to ‘white slave trade’. Before the great wars it meant the coercion or transportation of Caucasian women to the colonies to service white male officers. From 1904 there were efforts to stop ‘white slave trade’ leading to the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Person and the Exploitation of Others in 1949. It is the Palermo Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime that made trafficking in persons an international criminal offence in the year 2000. The Protocol was drafted to meet all aspects of trafficking, whether for sexual or labour exploitation. The Protocol's objectives are to prevent trafficking, punish traffickers and protect victims. The Protocol urges states to criminalize trafficking. It also specifies the activities, means and purposes that constitute the offence. The important features of the Protocol are:

202 Reviews and forhis thorough, well-informed, and insightful commentaries and contextual izations. His treatment of JohnAddington Symonds seems especially prescient as there are signs thatSymonds ison theverge of amajor critical re-evaluation, and it is extremely helpful toencounter such a serious and detailed treatmentof his poetry. In his Chapter 4, 'From Sexuality to Sexualities', Holmes's contention thatRossetti's 'Inclusiveness' allows his poetry tobe read as a 'queer poetry' isextremely interesting, as are his furtherspeculations about sexual identityand its manifestations during the nineteenth century.Though one may disagree with some of his formulations, this is an argument which should rightly rouse much critical interest among Victorianists working on representations of sexuality. Iwould have liked to seemore treatmentofEugene Lee-Hamilton, a finesonneteer and strong admirer ofRossetti, who, apart fromhis sonnet on DGR, isnot discussed. Neither his extremely original Imaginary Sonnets (i888), a series of sonnet mono logues spoken by characters from legend and history, nor his Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (i 894), a sequence predominantly lamenting his chronic invalidism, aremen tioned. The issue ofRossetti's own influences isnot really addressed either, although I suspect his 'Inclusiveness' may inpart derive fromSwinburne (usually thought of as his disciple), whose short sonnet sequence 'Hermaphroditus', published inPoems and Ballads (i866), anticipates many of the characteristics Holmes describes. How ever,Holmes's book is an excellent contribution to the critical literature on Rossetti and on lateVictorian sonnet sequences, and deserves tobe widely read. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON CATHERINE MAXWELL British Modernism and Censorship. By CELIA MARSHIK. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. 2oo6. xii+257pp. 348. ISBN 978-o-52i-85966-o. Celia Marshik's study argues that 'in the context of British modernism, censorship was repressive and also had productive effects' (p. 4). These included many ofmo dernism's 'trademark aesthetic qualities-such as self-reflexivity,fragmentation, and indirection' (p. 6). There are case-study chapters on Dante Gabriel Rossetti (included because he and his artistic circle 'areemerging as privileged sites ofmodernist genesis' (p. I4)), George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and JeanRhys. Each of these chapters discusses theauthor's careermore generally while focusing detailed analytical attention onto a single text. Such an approach allows for a range of concern and a subtlety of comment. At the same time the examples are, given the period covered (i 870-1934), spread rather thinover a time characterized by extensive change. Marshik's overwhelming concern iswith the actual or threatened censorship of sexual topics, and she exposes the fuzzy line between the unofficial power of various pressure groups and the power granted to the courts by Acts of Parliament. Her comments on the censorship of literature forblasphemous or seditious content are, incomparison, relatively restricted.The period of theFirstWorld War isof course a special case (onewhich a chapter on Lawrence would have illuminated), but publisher Grant Richards wrote in retrospect of the manuscript ofRobert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists-which he read before theoutbreak of thewar-that itwas 'damnably subversive'. Richards published the book, but in a heavily abridged (and arguably censored) form. Marshik concentrates especially on representations of prostitution and the 'white slave trade', but she also has some useful discussion of the embargo on the depiction of homosexuality. Virginia Woolf's revisions toA Room ofOne's Own involved the deletion of an archly ironic passage implying that 'Chloe and Olivia' shared a bed. MLR, I03.1, 2oo8 203 Would a comparable comment have survived inBetween the Acts had Woolf lived to revise this text too, or had times changed? Marshik assumes thatOrlando was vul nerable to prosecution because of its representation of prostitution, butWoolf was probably skating farnearer the edge with her gender-shifting hero(ine), whose very creation may owe something to the threatof censorship. (The device effectivelyallows Woolf to depict sex between two characters both born asmen without risking legal action.) Marshik's detailed discussion ofWoolf's excisions to the textof The Voyage Out isvery illuminating, as isher point thatLeonard and Virginia Woolf became far more vulnerable to the threatof legal action as publishers thanVirginia was as author. Discussing Jean Rhys's Voyage in theDark, Marshik argues, 'The first landlady that the reader encounters refuses to rent toAnna and a friend because she...

The white slave trade belongs to crimes dominated by transnational organized crime activity. The white slave trade at the turn of 20th and 21st centuries constitutes the international issue. The crime is oriented to both the slave trade and the human organs trade. First kind of the trade is mainly related with the rapidly developing sexual services market and the demand for low-paid or unpaid work, so-called slave work. The illegal adoption of children is also related with the white slave trade. Second kind of the trade, namely the human organs trade is related on the one hand with the development and progress of medicine allowing the extensive transplantations, on the other hand with shortage of the human organs to transplant. The white slave trade crime at the beginning of 21st century constitutes the considerable threat to national security and international security, the threat rated among offences against public safety and order.

Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

The measure promoted as England's first law against sex trafficking, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, journeyed through Parliament in 1912. Amid mounting extra-parliamentary protest over votes for women, workers' rights, and Home Rule for Ireland, the country's suffrage and socialist groups chose to engage with the somewhat ancillary Bill and the issue of trafficking (or ‘white slavery' as it was popularly known) through the powerful medium of their periodicals. They did so largely because they saw the value to their wider campaigns of using trafficking - a phenomenon often cast by reformers as involving the sexual exploitation of working-class women - to forge connections (or highlight disjunctures) between the suffragist and socialist movements. Ideas of race, national identity, and empire attached to configurations of ‘slavery' were central to their rhetoric, and to the links the groups made between trafficking and the political emancipation they sought. These ideas give a valuable insight into influential representations of trafficking in 1912 and the campaign against ‘white slavery' during what was a fundamental, transnational moment in the history of trafficking. They also illuminate suffragist and socialist rhetoric of the day, and the conflicting ideas of ‘Englishness’ therein. This article strives to unlock some of these insights.

This stirring declaration comes from the opening salvo of Hannah More,s 1805 essay entitled ‘Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster’. Though she had anonymously published the essay in The Weekly Entertainer; or agreeable and instructive repository, More eventually included it in her 1818 Collected Works, under a new, shorter title: The White Slave Trade’.1 Through this new title, More signalled that the essay might be read as a companion piece to her earlier work, The Black Slave Trade’ - alternatively entitled ‘Slavery: A Poem’ - published in 1788.1 will argue here that More’s essay can be consider in two different contexts: on the one hand, this piece is a biting satire revealing an intimate knowledge of issues arising in relation to the slave trade - not just the lives of slaves, but also the arguments circulating in relation to abolition. The essay hints as well at More’s meliorist position on slavery. On the other, however, in light of recent work on the representation of slavery by Saidiya Hartman, Marcus Wood and others, More’s essay warrants closer scrutiny for the questions it provokes concerning the polemical appropriation of images of enslaved Africans.2 If Hannah More participates in a significant late eighteenth-century backlash against consumption, she also renders affluent white women as the unthinking victims of an anthropomorphised male tyrant, a figure known as ‘Fashion’.3 Even as she promotes the idea of a ‘deep’ female subject, one remarkable for her spirituality and her resistance to material culture, she also denies women the agency that potentially comes from meaningful interaction with a world of goods.KeywordsSlave TradeConsumerist PracticeFemale ConsumerSocial RitualCompanion PieceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Campaigns to suppress human trafficking began in the nineteenth century with Josephine Butler’s effort to stop “white slavery” and the traffic in women and girls for prostitution. Today’s campaign was launched in the 1990s by the UN and heavily supported by the US Department of State. The target of the campaign has broadened to include males and victims of labor exploitation. This campaign is an example of an attempt to establish a global prohibition regime. Such regimes have successfully prohibited certain international crimes but they are notably ineffective at suppressing activities with the characteristics that mark human trafficking. Thus the modest numbers of convictions for trafficking are not surprising. Suppressing the trafficking for prostitution is the most problematic aspect of the campaign. Many states permit prostitution and refuse to try to abolish it. The existence of legal prostitution is believed by some to encourage trafficking for prostitution. Others disagree. The matter is hotly debated. The success of the anti-human trafficking campaign is likely to continue to be modest for the foreseeable future.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The essay continues to hold a central place within the recent history of feminist literary studies. The edition I cite here is from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Among numerous accounts of this transition, David Harvey's analysis stands out for its especially clear discussion of the psychic and sociological dimensions of Fordism. See The Condition of Postmodernity, 121–40. I have also drawn here from Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, cited below. Gallagher writes: “The phrase “white slaves,” which recurred frequently in Cobbett's widely read social criticism, formed a part of his legacy to later writers. Decades after the controversies over the slave trade and colonial slavery had been settled, Victorian social critics continued to use the phrase” (8). See also Carens. On the significance of the term “white slave” in the American context, see Roediger's chapter “White Slaves, Wage Slaves, and Free White Labor” (65–87). On “slaving” see 144–45. This passage was taken as the epigraph for another landmark of feminist theory: Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen's 1997 anthology Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. In using the term “abandonment” to think through the critical problems posed by postmodernism, Chow is drawing from Andrew Ross's work in his 1991 collection Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGordon BigelowGordon Bigelow teaches courses on the English Romantic and Victorian periods and on the literature and culture of modern Ireland. He joined the department of English at Rhodes in 1998, after earning a Ph.D. at the university of California, Santa Cruz. His essays have appeared in publications on English literature and Irish history, and his current research project focuses on the connections between literature and economic thought in the nineteenth century.

3 5 0 W e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e f a l l 2 0 0 6 political equality for themselves, and, often through the use of sustained tex­ tual analysis, refute whites’ knowledge about them as politically self-interested misrepresentations” (51). Three of the book’s four chapters consider resistances to political crises occasioned by white appropriation of land. Konkle’s reread­ ing of the documents of Cherokee Resistance sees Elias Boudinot, John Ridge, and John Ross as asserting that the Cherokee nation is a “modernizing Indian nation that persists despite” US federal and state mechanisms (46). Her consid­ eration of the large oeuvre of William Apess reveals his trenchant “critique of racial difference” at a moment when science, politics, and political expediency combined to advance a naturalized idea of race (104). Turning from an emphasis on land and treaty rights, Konkle considers how six Ojibwe intellectuals represented themselves, their history, and their traditions as a resistance to white ethnological scholarship that transmuted their cultural history into “idealized, romanticized stories that described Native peoples as inhabitants of the distant past” and that, thus, “quite literally sup­ ported colonial control” (160, 167). Themes of land, politics, racialization, and intellectual self-determination come together in her concluding examination of how Seneca and Tuscarora intellectuals resisted Euramerican attempts to narrate the histories of the putative eclipse of the “mythical Iroquois ‘empire’” and of Red Jacket as the “last heroic, eloquent, vanishing savage” (228). WritingIndian Nations is an extraordinary book, first, for its sheer accretion of testimony drawn from the work of numerous Native intellectuals; second, for its demonstration that these writers, thinkers, performers, and scholars were in conversation not only with their Euramerican political opponents, but also with other Native intellectuals; and finally, for its demonstration that “Native political struggles and their ongoing effects” must necessarily still impact our scholarship on “racism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and imperialism, where they are often glanced over” (7). Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada. By Jennifer Henderson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 288 pages, $63.00. Reviewed by Connie Brim Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia Jennifer Henderson’s Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada offers a discursive analysis of first-person narratives composed during the period when Canada was a settler colony: Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) by the British liberal activist Anna Brownell Jameson; Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear (1885) by Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney, both of whom were held captive during the anticolonial Northwest Rebellion of 1885; and the Janey Canuck writings by Emily Murphy, the first woman magistrate in the British Empire (1916) and one of the five women responsible for successfully campaigning for Canadian women to be recognized as persons. B o o k R e v i e w s 3 5 1 The theoretical underpinnings of Henderson’s study are Foucauldian. From Foucault she borrows theories of govemmentality, while from historians she borrows the idea of the settler colony as a liberal laboratory, specifically Canada as a testing ground for liberal ideas. Rejecting the traditional representation of Canadian literary history “as the organic expression of a people, involved in a process of maturation akin to that of the hero of a Bildungsroman” and arguing against the well-entrenched idea that early Canadian women’s writing was the voice “of a colony in the process of becoming a nation,” Henderson analyzes the settler women’s narra­ tives in order to expose what she calls “the microphysics of power in a settler colony” and to argue for a historicization of Canadian women’s writing that goes beyond a study of origins (3, 4, 4). She positions the writings not as iso­ lated texts of individual woman’s self-representation, but as texts influenced by discourses such as population control, white slavery, political economy, racial hygiene, and assimilative pedagogy. Henderson devotes one chapter to each text, beginning with Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, a work that establishes “Upper Canada as an experimental counter-site ... for govern­ mental strategies bent on the practical...

The American Revolution was a complex process, the military and political events of which are well documented. This article focuses on the socioeconomic aspects of the process in which the 13 American colonies broke away from the British Empire. By this point, the colonies had reached a level of development comparable to that of the mother country. The population grew through immigration from Europe of people seeking to free themselves from feudal and religious restrictions, as well as through the mass importing of servants (white slaves under contracts) and slaves from Africa. The colonies had significant differences in the structure of their economies and traded industrial goods with the mother country. In the South, a highly developed plantation agriculture based on slave labour remained until the Civil War. The colonists’ love of freedom and the unsuccessful actions of the British government caused a conflict that resulted in the former adopting the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The armed actions of the American rebels under the leadership of George Washington were supported by the French crown, initially through secret deliveries of arms and equipment. France’s entry into the war against Britain and the fighting between the two European powers on the North American continent played an important role in the victory of the rebel forces in 1781. The creation of a new state based on democracy and free enterprise led to rapid economic development, although slavery remained in place for several more generations.

The homeland security interests of a many nations are being increasingly threatened by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, drug trafficking, mass migration, global terrorism, environmental concerns, international crime and other global issues. This paper presents the case for development of such a transnational ballistic missile defense architecture for homeland defense and specifically addresses the architecture methodology and process, as well as the potential benefits and the top-level architecture trade issues that would have to be addressed if the community should decide to seriously pursue such an approach.

The music hall affair in 1930s Malta serves as a window into wider social, political issues embodied in the recurring furore that was `white slavery'. Sparked by accusations in London newspapers about sexual exploitation of English women who had come to work as music hall artistes, politicians, newspaper editors, the police and the church in Malta addressed the issue. Although the claims about English women were not true, the stories raised larger questions about prostitution in Malta's night-time leisure economy, and sexual exploitation of foreign artistes and Maltese barmaids did occur in this context. The British reaction followed the pattern of response in other colonies: military authorities chose to focus on the health threat to their personnel posed by what they saw as an indigenous problem of prostitution, rather than acknowledge the effects of colonial rule on local society. Maltese authorities chose to avoid political and economic truths of colonial rule as well: they decided to make the immoral character of the women involved the problem to be addressed. The music hall affair did not champion international human rights, but reflected parochial fears of foreigners and colonial others.