Prostitution as Privilege: The ‘American Girl’ of Treaty-Port Shanghai, 1860–1937

prostitutes transplanted to the colonial periphery in Asia staked out a unique and enduring place in the sexual economy of modern empires. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of these women made their way from Europe, Russia, and the United States to coastal China, Japan, the Straits Settlements, and India. Until the massive influx into the region of White Russians after 1917, colonial demographics and racial attitudes generally afforded these women a good living, privileged status, and control over their working conditions. Having survived both periodic municipal reform campaigns in the colonies and various political and economic vicissitudes, Western prostitutes were ultimately driven out of the region in the late 1930s by the League of Nations campaign against 'white slavery' and Japanese territorial expansion. Western European and American prostitutes were ubiquitous in the colonies, as was the struggle among resident foreigners to control prostitution among their own nationals. Although League of Nations surveys give detailed figures for the 1920s and 1930s, little quantitative information is available for earlier periods; police records typically give figures in the tens, while missionary and anti-vice groups report hundreds. The significance of the white colonial prostitute owed less, however, to numbers than to race. Throughout the colonial era, 'respectable' men and women living in the colonies as well as in the metropolis viewed what the Singapore Straits Times described in 1862 as 'the unwholesome immigration' of Western prostitutes as undermining white prestige and moral authority, inasmuch as the 'native mind cannot well distinguish the broad line that in our communities separates this one class from all others'.1 Like other types of white riff-raff, prostitutes in the colonies were given the ambiguous status of privileged pariah in a society in which race