'White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths' : European networks of prostitution and colonial anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880-1914

Abstract

The international traffic in European prostitutes to South Asia became a matter of political debate both in Britain and India from the 1880s onwards. After discussing briefly the metropolitan obsession with the so-called 'White Slave Traffic', this article reconstructs the spread of the prostitution networks until WW I, gives a short account of the working conditions of the European prostitutes, and analyses the discourse it provoked around the topics of morality and racial prestige between various and often antagonistic sectors of colonial and metropolitan societies. By focusing on a group of 'white subalterns', this article challenges received notions af colonialism as an homogenous enterprise based on clear-cut racial distinctions and makes a strong argument for the introduction of 'class' as an important category for the understanding of the imperial project.