"The Maiden Tribute" and the Rise of the White Slave in the Nineteenth Century: The Making of an Imperial Construct

Abstract

white slave burst upon the scene of moral and social reform at the centre of the British Empire in the summer of 1885, when Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead published The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, a week-long expos? of child prostitution in London that was to serve as the first official report of a sexual traffic, according to Stead, in English girls. By the first decade of the twentieth-century the white slave had become a major focus of the reform movement throughout the Empire, and, indeed, beyond it. white slavery panic which Mariana Valverde has traced in English Canada between 1885 and 1925 (77-103) was a global phenomenon, or, more precisely an imperial one. That is, white slavery as we still understand it?the sell [ing] or trap [ping of] (a girl) into enforced prostitution, especially] abroad {OED 1989 20: 268)?was a pre occupation of all the Western industrialized nations which, John Strachey has pointed out, [f]rom about 1870 ... with one accord, but in ferocious rivalry with each other, [had] turned to the annexation of the rest of the world (98). Britain, France, Germany and the United States, along with a cluster of smaller states (79), Strachey observes, all engaged in the late nineteenth-century land grab; they all likewise demonstrated a powerful fear, during the expansionist period, about a sexual trade whose commodity was young white women. Edward J. Bristow has noted a widespread anxiety in France about the trade that was called La Traite des Blanches and in Germany was known as M?dchen-Handel (37). Between 1885 and the 1920s, the United