ABSTRACT The enslaved Black female body was a significant site of sexual exploitation during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and fated to a long passage of sexual assault. Slavery was rife with various sexual aggressions like rape on the enslaved Black woman by both Black and white heterosexual men. In addition, to facilitate their sexual perversions, the white slave masters ‘whiten’ the Black identities of the female slaves by revoking the slaves’ African names and imposing on them white Euro-American names. This ‘whitened’ identity becomes a fetish for the slave masters as they fixate on the misrepresented Black female bodies to satisfy their sexual fantasies. Though scholarship has grappled with the issue of sexual violation in the slavery arena, (Foster 2019; Jennings 1990, Oduwobi 2017), the subject has not received the fullest attention. For instance, there exist significant gaps on the question of the psychosexual motivations which drive the white slave masters to ‘whiten’ and fixate on their Black female slaves. Situating the present paper in the period of proto-colonialism, the long period of European and African commercial interrelations when slavery thrived, this study adopts Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytical framework on colonial sexuality as well as Freudian libido theory to discuss the interplay of sexuality and identity between the Black slave raider and the slave master with the enslaved Black woman, as well as the relationship between the white slave master and the Black enslaved woman. The study focuses on two Ghanaian neo-slave narratives: Joseph Baiden’s Seeds of Slavery (2018) and Manu Herbstein’s Ama (2002) and concludes amongst others that the quest to ‘whiten’ the enslaved Black woman is borne out of the slave master's irrepressible obsession with the Black female body.

The article presents an integrated analysis of the historical evolution and contemporary trends of human trafficking in the context of international and national experience. The aim of the study is to comprehensively assess the genesis of trafficking, its transnational nature, socio-economic determinants, and the dynamics of the development of legal regulation in order to form an effective preventive policy in the Georgian context. The work is based on doctrinal-legal, comparative-legal, and historical-critical analysis. The main instruments of international law are studied, including the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic and the Palermo Protocol, as well as the normative framework developed within the United Nations. An assessment of the degree of harmonization of international standards and Georgian national legislation is carried out. The study also includes an interdisciplinary analysis that combines criminological, sociological, and economic perspectives in order to identify the structural transformation of trafficking and its modern forms—labor, sexual, and organ exploitation. The analysis shows that trafficking is a historically transformed phenomenon, which, under the conditions of globalization, has taken the form of organized and transnational crime. Special attention is paid to the post-Soviet space, where the economic crises following the collapse of the Soviet system, institutional weakness, and social destabilization have become important factors in the expansion of the phenomenon. The paper critically analyzes the relationship between prostitution and trafficking, emphasizing the impact of technological progress and digital platforms on the increase in the latency of crime, as well as the role of economic inequality in the process of involving vulnerable groups in exploitation. The study concluded that effective prevention of human trafficking requires a complex and multi-sectoral approach that combines legal, social, economic, and educational policies. Particular importance is attached to the harmonization of national legislation with international standards, the strengthening of specialized institutional mechanisms, an effective system of protection and reintegration of victims, as well as the deepening of regional and international cooperation. The work creates a theoretical and practical basis for the development and implementation of a modern, evidence-based policy against trafficking in Georgia.

This paper is a critique of the common-sense view of pain and the role it plays in contemporary political life. I argue that the common-sense understanding of pain as a uniform and universal human experience has insidious political effects. It makes pain recognisable only insofar as the subject-in-pain becomes an object-like container of pain. I show that this feature of the common-sense view reflects a larger contradiction in contemporary politics, whereby subjective testimony is superficially championed, but only in the sense that subjects act as vessels of their own experience and sensations. On the common-sense view, subjects simply ‘have’ pains and those pains are necessarily ‘bad’. Pain is not constituted subjectively, through the subject’s own interpretations of its inner sensations; it is simply the effect of a pathological process in the body that must be stopped. Insofar as subjective interpretations do not matter to the ontological make-up of pain, the subject is effectively reduced to being a container of pain – it contains, but does not interpret, configure or constitute, a given object called pain. I show how this ‘container’ view of the subject pervades and structures the contemporary politics of pain, with self-defeating effects for social justice efforts. From feminists rallying around ‘women’s pain’, white slavery abolitionists purportedly ‘empathising’ with black pain, liberals making promises of the ‘painless good life’, to anti-abortion activists deploying the spectre of foetal pain, pain offers everywhere the temptation of hermeneutic and ontological givenness in this unstable and polarised world – a thing we can at least all agree on is necessarily ‘bad’. I argue that we should resist this temptation, and instead include contestations over the meanings of pain in our struggle over the terms of shared life.

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.

From the late seventeenth century onward, the central aim of missionary Christianity in the British Atlantic was to Christianize slavery; that is, to render the institution morally and theologically acceptable within a Christian framework. This work of “amelioration” was envisioned as a gradual process, with missionaries from both the established Church of England and a host of dissenting denominations playing a central role in its advancement. Collectively, they promoted a discourse of Christian slavery that aimed both to reassure slaveowners of the compatibility between slavery and Christianity and to frame the conversion of enslaved people as a means of producing a more obedient, industrious, and morally disciplined labor force. To be sure, in promoting a Christianized vision of slavery, missionary societies were deeply complicit in the exploitation of enslaved Africans. Yet, ironically, the very tools they employed to pacify and discipline (biblical instruction and literacy) were repurposed to articulate a platform of resistance, ultimately contributing to slavery’s undoing. This essay employs critical discourse analysis to examine how these dynamics unfolded in two pivotal uprisings in the British Atlantic world: the Demerara Rebellion of 1823 and the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 in Jamaica. In both cases, missionary endeavors contributed to the counter-discursive appropriation of biblical theology that played a critical role in transforming enslaved people into agents of political change. Still, reimagining scripture was only part of the story. Crucially, it was the alignment of a new religious consciousness with unfolding political events, that transformed simmering discontent into open revolt.

The crime whose object is people, who acquire the epithet „white slavery“, is not unknown, but it constantly manifests itself in new forms and shapes, through which it always finds ways to appear legal, most often hiding under legal professions and occupations. Internal human trafficking, which was invisible for a long period of time, gradually expanding the spectrum of trends of realization, today exists everywhere in the region. Human trafficking represents a serious violation of fundamental human rights and a strong affront to human dignity. The analysis of the developments in the area of ​​human trafficking on the territory of the country and beyond confirms the facts of the Republic of North Macedonia increasingly being identified as a country of origin, and to a certain extent also a country of transit and destination for victims of human trafficking, where internal human trafficking dominates, which is carried out on the basis of certain methods of recruitment followed by an appropriate form of exploitation, as an achieved goal of previously organized and planned activities of human traffickers.

The crime whose object is people, who acquire the epithet „white slavery“, is not unknown, but it constantly manifests itself in new forms and shapes, through which it always finds ways to appear legal, most often hiding under legal professions and occupations. Internal human trafficking, which was invisible for a long period of time, gradually expanding the spectrum of trends of realization, today exists everywhere in the region. Human trafficking represents a serious violation of fundamental human rights and a strong affront to human dignity. The analysis of the developments in the area of ​​human trafficking on the territory of the country and beyond confirms the facts of the Republic of North Macedonia increasingly being identified as a country of origin, and to a certain extent also a country of transit and destination for victims of human trafficking, where internal human trafficking dominates, which is carried out on the basis of certain methods of recruitment followed by an appropriate form of exploitation, as an achieved goal of previously organized and planned activities of human traffickers.

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.

The purpose of the study is to demonstrate a new direction of integrating educational material from the History of Ukraine into the context of world history. Namely to outline the ethnic and civilizational contacts in the Middle Ages and define the place of Ruthenians in the processes. Methodology. The main research method was the historical-cultural method, which consists in close studying relevant historical sources. Scientific novelty. The article traces the history of the Slavic ethnic groups as it was reflected in the Muslim sources. It is proved that in many cases the Slavs, mentioned in these sources were in fact, Ruthenians/Rusyns. Conclusions. Contacts between the Slavic and Arab world’s existed from the earliest times of the new era, as indicated by the texts of Muslim historians, travel writers, geographers, traders, and other scholars of that time. Even though Rusyns are not explicitly mentioned in Arab documents, it is obvious that they were slaves from Rus, especially when described as white slaves (saqaliba) in Andalusia although they may not be exclusively from Rus. Geographical position of Andalusia, Varangians, and Kyivan Rus makes this assumption quite plausible. Therefore, the prospects of further research should include not only the clarification and clarification of specific scientific facts, but also further popularization and explanatory work on the civilizational contacts (both positive and negative) in different historical periods. All of the above is directly related to teaching the subject of History of Ukraine in both secondary and higher education. This concerns, firstly, the introduction of new sources and new material (although some points remain hypothetical, which should be emphasized during teaching), and, secondly, the formation of a broader horizon and ability among students to consider the history of Ukrainian lands and the Ukrainian people in a broader European and civilizational (on the scale of the Greater Mediterranean) context. This task is relevant, since many pages of Ukrainian history remain little known to the general public and insufficiently covered in modern scientific publications. This especially applies to contacts between the peoples of Ukraine and the cultures of the Orient.

ABSTRACT This article reconsiders Emma Goldman's essay, ‘The Traffic in Women', interrogating the centrality of race in gendered understandings of women's work. In constructing a genealogy of sex work, sweatshops, and discourses of slavery, it turns to domestic work as the occupation, dominated by Black women, but missing from the terms ‘white slavery' and ‘wage slavery’ at the time when the United States industrialized. The afterlife of slavery impacted Black women in ways that demand an intersectional analysis. Consideration of their sex and domestic work complicates scholarly assumptions about the continuum of cheap, free, and coerced work under racial capitalism.

This article traces the development of feminist thought about sex work through the International Feminist Network Against Female Sexual Slavery (IFNAFSS). IFNAFSS was a radical feminist network that framed all sex work as ‘sexual slavery’. This understanding of sex work was indebted to complex racialised ‘anti-white slavery’ campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While discourses of white slavery infuse global anti-trafficking legislation today, we suggest that it was radical feminism that first drew on these earlier campaigns. We highlight the crucial role the United Nations World Conferences on Women, particularly the 1980 Copenhagen conference, played in the development of IFNAFSS and the global spread of the idea of female sexual slavery. IFNAFSS was also contested at this conference, particularly by the International Network for Wages for Housework (WfH). We discuss the first IFNAFSS meeting in Rotterdam in 1983, to demonstrate how female sexual slavery was taken up and transformed by feminists in the Global South. These feminists accounted for female sexual slavery not only through patriarchy, but through a complex analysis that brought patriarchy into dialogue with other oppressive forces. This article demonstrates how the meaning of ideas are never fixed but can be repurposed and tempered across contexts.

et, surtout, sur les nombreuses rsistances qu'ils rencontrent.Selon l'autrice, la suprmatie blanche trouve d'ailleurs ses racines dans une forme de suprmatie protestante au XVII e sicle.

Abstract“Troubling Terms and the Sex Trades” assembles writings from scholars, sex workers, and activists, each of whom interrogates a troubled term and its place in the history of prostitution. This introduction discusses the “keyword” tradition of historical genealogies advanced by Raymond Williams and its utility for assessing critical categories that inform historical studies and current political debates on prostitution. The essay reviews the historiography of prostitution as it has focused on troubling terms, mostly centered specifically on the categories of sex work and trafficking. The essay goes on to introduce the components of this special issue: the first section, Reflections, presents short first-person accounts by sex worker activists, advocates, and scholars regarding a critical keyword they have worked with or resisted. The second section, Features, presents longer essays that interrogate the terms sex work, demand, white slavery, red-light district, restricted area, and decriminalization. Finally, Curated Spaces explores the history of the red umbrella as a visual term that has developed as a global symbol for sex worker rights.

Abstract This article offers an example of how the convergence of discourses on “white slavery” and social hygiene led to the disproportionate criminalization, displacement, and detention of Black sex workers by authorities in early twentieth-century San Diego. The city’s large military presence, proximity to the US-Mexico border, and interracial sociality (between white, immigrant, and nonwhite communities) led to the regulation of its interracial sex tourism industry. As the city prepared for its first major military project, the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, public health officials demolished tenement housing for plumbing violations and followed with the compulsory quarantining of sex workers, couched in concerns about venereal disease. The sexual policing of Black sex workers by local, state, and military authorities was underpinned by discourses that imagined Black women as risks to public health and white women’s virtue in the US-Mexico border town.

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the shrouded career of undercover reporter Natalie de Bogory (mostly from 1911–1922) to illustrate how reporters collaborated with public-private networks to regulate real or perceived crime and extend the reach of the security state, before the practice later expanded within the FBI. De Bogory was twice a guide. Undercover for newspapers, she escorted readers through an urban working-class underworld of dance, sex, and employed single women. Her journalism, however, obscured her more covert work. For private reformers who partnered with city officials, she investigated social issues, including allegations of “White slavery,” the alleged sex trafficking of immigrant women. That work, during the nativist hysteria of World War I, drew de Bogory into a scheme to promote the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that was later dubbed a “Warrant for Genocide.” This history of de Bogory is an argument for studying the careers of relatively unknown journalists who often worked multiple jobs to understand their impact, and expose the interconnectivity of journalism with other professions and institutions. This article reconstructs de Bogory’s career to reclaim the tradition of reporters collaborating with reformist public-private networks. Then, that neglected history is framed as a model for Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which publicized the Protocols.

Abstract This article is based on the presidential address presented to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in 2023. Its focus is Maury Diggs and Drew Caminetti, two white men from Sacramento, California, charged with violating the Mann Act (known as the White Slave Trafficking Act) in 1913. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era obsession with white slavery, a phenomenon that has particular resonance in today’s climate, reveals the power of moral panics. Examining the steps, and missteps, that various legal, social, and political entities, including all three branches of government, took in response to Diggs and Caminetti’s actions highlights some of the major social changes gripping the nation. Moral panics can be investigated as crucial historical sites of contestation, revealing efforts to neutralize or turn back the societal changes perceived to be the greatest threat to the prevailing social power structure—in this case foreigners, the new leisure culture, the liberalization of sexual attitudes, and the threat of female independence. Understanding the origins and repercussions of past moral panics can help identify, understand, and possibly defuse future panics.

The article examines number of Danish films about ‘white female slaves’ which did not only become a noticeable event in European filmmaking and gained popularity in Russia, but also marked the concern for the ‘women’s issue’ in world cinema.Although small by modern standards, Danish cinema of the early 1910s had a significant impact on the world cinema. Far from being the European leader in the number of releases, it, nevertheless, managed to set the tone in the ‘cup-and saucer’ drama, start a fashion for ‘Danish melodrama’ and provocative movies, introduce the viewer to the ‘Danish kiss’ and generate a new ‘vamp’ heroines which would soon transform into the image of a new woman and mark the most important changes in the socio-cultural and socio-political life of society. Later all the Danish innovations would be picked up and developed by German, Soviet and American film industries.Danish films exploited the controversial and taboo subject of human vice, sexuality and inter-gender relationships, often responding to current and sensational agendas. What the Russian pre-revolutionary press called “glamorizing the 20th century moral degradation” can in fact be also attributed to the film industry’s adaptation of scandal to its needs, i.e. the creation of an action-packed story. Thus, Danish film industry enters the international film market with the hot topic of “white slavery”.The paper analyzes the films about “women's slavery” made in 1907–1912 and traces how the cultural and historical context of the time transformed the acute social theme of sexual slavery into an ideological construct of ‘new woman’ representing the ‘spirit of the time’ (German: Zeitgeist).

The article is devoted to the image of a vamp in Danish films, evolving by the 1920s into the image of a new woman, which later on gained major popularity in German and Soviet films.Not so vast by modern standards, Danish cinema in the early 1910s had a marked impact on the development of imagery in the world film art. Without having the lead in amount of films brought to the European film market, it however succeeded in setting the style in the cup-and-saucer drama genre, starting the fashion for specifically Danish melodramas and film sensations, introducing the viewer to the “Danish kiss” and crafting the image of a “vamp”, which very soon evolved in the world cinema into that of a new woman, reflective of the most important changes in the socio-cultural and socio-political life. Thereafter all the finds of the Danish filmmakers would be picked up and developed by the German, Soviet and American cineastes.Danish films preyed on the controversial and taboo ground of human vices, sexuality and gender relationships, commonly responding to urgent and sensational issues. What the Russian pre-revolutionary press called “glamorization of the 20th century shame” actually refers to what filmmakers did taking advantage of sensational facts for framing thrillers. So, for example the Danish cinema enters the international film market with the hotly debated back then topic of “white slavery”.The paper analyzes the pictures introducing the image of a vamp (the cyclus of “white slaves”, “The Abyss”, “Dance of the Vampire”, “Witches” etc.) and makes a guess at how the acute social issue of sexual slavery under the influence of culture-historical circumstances had evolved in cinema into the ideological construct of “the new woman”.

Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave is a powerful memoir and slave narrative that reveals the barbarity and inhumanity of the 19th-century American slave trade. Through his firsthand account of being kidnapped and sold into slavery, Northup exposes the greed, deceit, violence, and subjugation that drove white slave traders and masters to dehumanize and commodify black people for their own economic gain. Northup's narrative sheds light on the brutality of slavery and how it stripped both enslaved people and white slaveholders of their humanity. The book illustrates the horrors of slavery, from the physical and emotional abuse inflicted upon enslaved people to the use of religion to justify and uphold the system of slavery. Northup's narrative emphasizes the helplessness, impotence, and oppression of black slaves, particularly those who were born free but were abducted and sold into slavery like himself. Ultimately, the book reflects the resilience and determination of enslaved people to survive in a violent, oppressive, and hostile world.

Frederick Douglass’s first tour of the British Isles (1845–1847) proved a pivotal episode in the life of the legendary campaigner and the broader fight against slavery. Douglass made over three-hundred speaking appearances during his nineteen-month stay—sparking public debate, generating hundreds of newspaper articles, and reinvigorating an antislavery movement that had largely stalled in Britain since the 1830s. Douglass’s campaigning revealed early glimpses of his rhetorical skills and political instincts, including his successful navigation of the “white slavery” controversy and an impressive publicity blitz on the nation’s newspapers. However, Douglass’s time in Britain was not an unmitigated success. This paper examines the limitations of his work—including the failure to successfully pressurize the Free Church of Scotland into returning donations linked to slavery, and the strategic decisions that limited Douglass’s ability to deliver tangible results. In so doing, the paper attempts a more nuanced and dispassionate assessment of Douglass’s tour—evaluating his visit as a political campaign (not an oratory showcase) with successes and failures that shaped the most influential Black American of the nineteenth century.