Christian Grey’s biological mother was Ella, a drug-addicted sex worker. Christian and Ella lived in extreme poverty in Detroit and both were badly abused by Ella’s pimp. Christian was 4 years old when his mother committed suicide; he spent four days with her dead body until the pimp found them and called the police. In later life, Christian only referred to his mother as “the crack whore”.

The background of one of the main characters of the best seller Fifty Shades trilogy is characterized by platitudes that are all too often believed to be “typical” of prostitution: poverty, male abuse, economic exploitation, drugs, decadence, and trauma. Yet the extent to which these representations of prostitution are supported by sound empirical evidence has since the last decades of the twentieth century increasingly been questioned by scholars, activists, and sex workers who call for the integration of commercial sex in the realm of labour. This book seeks to engage in this ongoing debate by means of a global and comparative history of female prostitution in cities worldwide from 1600 to the present.

Notwithstanding the large number of national studies on particular aspects of prostitution (policies, attitudes, and labour market), no international comparison over a significant span of time has ever been attempted. We start in the early modern period in order to gauge whether practices and attitudes regarding prostitution have altered throughout the last four centuries around the world. By including the precolonial situation, we aim to observe to what extent prostitution changed with the settlement of Europeans in overseas territories. Although the distinction between “premodern” and “modern” prostitution is perhaps not very sharp, we presume that the important political, military, and socioeconomic changes that took place from ca. 1600 onward have had a profound impact on the sale of sex. The long historical and broad geographical approach of our project permits us to draw some general conclusions regarding the extent to which the practice of prostitution and societal reactions to it have been influenced by processes of colonization, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of nation-states, nationalism, and war, as well as revolutions in the realms of politics, transport, and communication. Furthermore, the increased organization of prostitutes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the increased scholarly attention that has been paid to prostitution and the main actors in the sex industry (prostitutes, pimps, brothel keepers, traffickers, and clients), have encouraged us to extend the research to the present. The focus on female prostitution in urban settings is justified on the one hand because commercial sex has nearly always been an urban phenomenon involving women servicing men, and on the other hand because the information available is limited, as male and transgender prostitution in the past, as well as rural prostitution, have been even more elusive than female sex work.

The project follows the research model used in earlier comparative projects carried out by the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) on the history of dock and textile workers. ¹ In the first phase of the project we solicited a set of urban studies on the history of prostitution in different countries for the period between 1600 and the present. To facilitate international comparisons, the authors of these urban overviews were requested to systematically address a number of topics/questions that were listed in a framework document. The latter is included below as an appendix to this introduction. In the second phase of the project, we invited a number of authors to write thematic comparative essays based on the collection of urban overviews. In the third stage of the project, the authors of the urban and thematic papers, as well as other experts on prostitution (in total nearly forty researchers from around the world) came together at the conference “Selling Sex in the City: Prostitution in World Cities, 1600 to the Present”, which took place at the International Institute of Social History from 25 to 27 April 2013. This volume contains the revised versions of a selection of the papers presented at that conference. More information about the book’s structure and the regions and themes contained therein will be provided at the end of this introductory note. Priority is given first to a justification of the choices we have made for this collective research project.

Even though the participants in the project were not explicitly required to adopt a particular approach to prostitution, we requested that they focus not only on the policies, societal attitudes, and structural factors that have influenced the sex industry but also on prostitutes’ profiles and culture, as well as on working and living conditions. We—and many of the authors involved in this and other scientific studies—understand prostitution to be a form of work and therefore attempt to achieve a comprehensive overview of this activity from a global labour history perspective. This approach is linked to our understanding of work, which goes beyond the exclusionary concepts of labour that became dominant from the nineteenth century onward. For instance, writing in the 1830s, French nobleman Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac divided the proletariat into four groups, “the workers, the beggars, the thieves and the public women”, implying an understanding of only the first category to be “real” workers. In his view, “the worker is a proletarian, because he works in order to live and earns a wage; the beggar is a proletarian, who does not want to work or cannot work, and begs in order to live; the thief is a proletarian, who does not want to work or beg, and, in order to make a living, steals; the prostitute is a proletarian, who neither wants to work, nor beg, nor steal, and, in order to live, sells her body.” ² Around the same period, the Communist League articulated the desire of “respectable” and “free” workers (meaning male wage earners) to distinguish themselves from slaves and other unfree labourers, the self-employed and the lumpenproletariat. And although Karl Marx himself seems to have been rather ambiguous about prostitutes and their relation vis-à-vis the working class, ³ most nineteenth-century commentators defined survival activities such as prostitution as unproductive, work-shy, deviant, or even criminal. ⁴

This narrow conceptualization of work, which led to the institutionalization and idealization of wage labour, has increasingly been challenged. Already at the end of the 1800s, new terms were introduced to describe activities that take place outside or at the edge of the conventional labour market. The political scientist Rotering, for example, referred to activities that are perceived as a public nuisance and that are distinct from “decent” or “formal” work as “negative work”. ⁵ But the expansion of the concept of work has only recently become popular among scholars and activists. Over the last decades, terms such as “precarious labour” and “informal” and “irregular work” have been used to depict (respectively) poorly paid, short-term, and unstable occupations, jobs excluded from the formal economy, and income-generating activities to which “a heterodox or even asocial character is attributed inasmuch as they lack general approval.” ⁶ These novel conceptualizations have enabled the inclusion of reproductive or “female activities” such as care work and domestic service within the world of labour. ⁷

The labour approach to prostitution follows this recent shift in the social sciences. In particular, historians have been of crucial importance in the removal of prostitution from the literature of crime and deviancy and the inclusion of prostitutes in the history of work. ⁸ Yet, to paraphrase Timothy Gilfoyle, new academic interpretations of prostitution hardly undermine traditional views on commercial sex. ⁹ Broadly speaking, we can identify four trends (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive) within societal analyses and the scientific study of prostitution. ¹⁰ The deviant framework—much in vogue in the modern period but certainly not defunct in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—departs from the assumption that prostitution creates a law and order problem because it gives rise to all kinds of uncivilized, asocial, criminal, and unhealthy behaviour. Scholars, social workers, activists, and public authorities who support this view define prostitution in terms of deviant behaviour that needs to be controlled, regulated, or prohibited. ¹¹ In the morality view, prostitution is perceived as a sin and a social evil or as symbolic of the double sexual standard for men and women. ¹² Somewhat linked to the former, the oppression model holds that prostitution comes about through gender inequality and poverty. Its proponents insist that disadvantaged socioeconomic circumstances and gendered power relations force women into prostitution. Their “appalling” condition thus exposes them to exploitative situations as well as violence and human trafficking. Within this approach, the “prostituted woman” is not criminalized but victimized. Since these women are not seen as persons who exchange sexual services for money or other benefits but as victims who are compelled to sell their bodies in patriarchal societies, prostitution is often defined as rape or sexual slavery. ¹³ The sex work paradigm also departs from a socioeconomic and gender analysis but contrary to the oppression view, it stresses the agency of the people involved in prostitution. It focuses on the opinions and motivations of the concerned actors who implicitly or explicitly perceive prostitution as an alternative way to make a living, often preferable to other strenuous, dangerous, and low-paid jobs.

The labour approach to prostitution has been influenced by various intertwined forces, the first of which is the increasing participation of women in public protests. Even though the beginning of the sex workers’ movement is commonly located in the 1970s, evidence exists of prostitutes organizing protests and stating their demands to the authorities already by the end of the nineteenth century. In British territories, Indian prostitutes protested against the harsh regulation system; in imperial Russia, they demanded health examinations of clients, not just prostitutes; in New Orleans in 1907, prostitutes organized a successful strike against rent increases; and in the 1930s, Argentinian women involved in prostitution used printed media to call for better working conditions and respect for prostitutes as workers. In interwar Germany, prostitutes developed various strategies to resist abuse and gain more control over their working conditions; some even formed their own union, the Association of the Legal Prostitutes of Hamburg and Altona. In the United States too, early trade unions like the Industrial Workers of the World approached prostitution as work and had prostitutes as members. ¹⁴ Then, as the political and cultural changes brought about by the 1960s and ’70s led to a further strengthening of the feminist movement, prostitutes in different parts of the world became more vocal and appropriated the language of human rights to create more stable structures. The introduction of the terms “sex work” and “sex worker” has been an important semantic shift signifying the growth of a movement that understands commercial sex in terms of labour and expects state protection. ¹⁵

Obviously, stretching the concept of labour to include societal phenomena such as prostitution within the legal parameters of work can have political and socioeconomic consequences that (with a few exceptions) not even secular, highly sexualized societies seem prepared to cope with. On a theoretical level, this conceptual expansion can also have implications for the social sciences. As Yvonne Svanström questions, “How far can the work-concept be stretched without losing its meaning?” ¹⁶ Should all remunerated activities, including begging, petty crime, surrogate pregnancy, and so on, as well as unpaid occupations such as elder and child care, housekeeping, subsistence farming or volunteer work be treated as work irrespective of how the people involved or society at large perceive these tasks?

John Budd offers a broad conceptualization which makes it possible to understand all such activities as work: “work is defined […] as purposeful human activity involving physical or mental exertion that is not undertaken solely for pleasure and that has economic or symbolic value.” ¹⁷ True, the boundaries between work and non-work/leisure are often blurred, especially when entertainment, sexuality, and emotions are involved. But if we understand work to be the “production of useful objects or services”, ¹⁸ then prostitution is a form of labour. There is no reason why overtly or less overtly sexualized activities such as acting, modelling, professional dancing, massaging, and so on should be viewed as work/service and prostitution should not. The working and living conditions of prostitutes are often substandard and degrading but as the contributions to this book evidence, this situation seems to come about due to a lack of state protection, outright repression, and stigma rather than from an intrinsically harmful nature associated with prostitution. Moreover, detrimental physical and psychological effects can occur in all kinds of occupations. As Kimberly-Anne Ford has demonstrated in her comparative study of hospital work and prostitution in Montreal, the stress levels and assault rates among orderlies and prostitutes were surprisingly similar. ¹⁹

Hence if we treat prostitution as the provision of sexual services, shouldn’t we, once and for all, get rid of the old terms and systematically use “sex work” and “sex worker” instead? We choose not to, and use both “sex work/er” and “prostitution/prostitute” nearly interchangeably throughout this book. Even though some authors have a preference for one over the other, sex work (in the narrow sense) is used here as a synonym for prostitution. This brings us to another intricate issue: a justification for the terms used and the definition of prostitution.

At the start of the project that led to this publication we did not offer the participants a definition of prostitution, but we asked them to pay attention to the overlapping of legal and cultural conceptualizations throughout place and time. In other words, we asked them to make clear what in the city or town discussed a prostitute was considered to be, and what kind of activities constituted prostitution and which ones did not. As the authors of this book demonstrate, the variety of sexual arrangements or “loose behaviours” that public authorities and private actors have perceived to be outright or close to prostitution is immense. We prefer the simplest possible definition. A barebones definition of prostitution would be that it is the provision of physical sex for payment and this is done with no prospects for marriage. The latter is included to distinguish prostitution from long-term socially accepted relationships that involve sexual exchange and financial arrangements. ²⁰ Payment is intentionally imprecise so that it can include other forms of remuneration besides money, and to leave the distinction between “treating” ²¹ and payment to the cultural norms of the time and place in question. That the sex should be physical is included to distinguish prostitution from paid sexually-charged services like stripping, phone sex, or pornography. All these forms of commercial sex are included in the (broadly understood) term “sex work”.

Recently, other notions have been introduced to describe situations in which an upfront monetary transaction does not take place, like sex-tourism relations and sexual-economic relationships with teenagers or young men and women, where gifts such as trips, meals, phones, drugs, or school tuition are seen as being compensation for the services rendered. According to Kamala Kempadoo, the notion “transactional sex” is more useful in describing the activities of persons who are located outside the sex industry. Transactional sex can be read as “the umbrella term for all acts, including but not limited to sex work, where sexuality is exchanged for material and other non-sexual benefits.” ²² Similarly, Amalia Cabezas challenges the concept of sex work as the only viable tool for understanding interactions between tourists and locals in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. She argues that important issues such as affection, companionship, and intimacy are absent in the terms “prostitution” and “sex work”. For this reason, Cabezas chooses to use the term “tactical sex”, which serves as a better means of understanding the “complex circulation of sex and affect”. The importance of gifts is emphasized, as they represent an “important feature of exchange and solidarity” and can transform the sexual relationship into one of courtship and love. ²³

Neologisms like sex work, transactional sex, or tactical sex stress the self-perception of the actors concerned and avoid the stigma surrounding prostitution. As with “charity girls”, ²⁴ people involved in transactional or tactical sex do not define themselves as “prostitutes” or “sex workers” but rather as “escorts”, “entertainers”, “business girls”, “beach boys”, “friends”, and so on; and, people engaged in the unambiguous exchange of sex for money today tend to prefer the term “sex worker”. ²⁵ Yet the new terminology has its limitations. As Kamala Kempadoo admits, “the notion of tactical sex closely approximates what has been described […] as transactional sex, even while the definitions of both remain fuzzy.” ²⁶ Furthermore, the boundary between transactional/tactical sex and prostitution/sex work is not always clear.

According to Amalia Cabezas, the term “tactical sex” makes it possible for us to acknowledge that commodification and affection are not mutually exclusive, but this can also be said of unequivocal sex work. Sufficient empirical evidence exists which testifies that prostitutes in past and present societies have often offered much more than fast and unceremonious sexual intercourse, and that their relations with loyal clients frequently involved friendship and even affection. ²⁷ Transactional sex is said to respond to the interest of new needs (the “commodities of modernity”), rather than basic ones. ²⁸ However, past and contemporary prostitutes have often justified their involvement in commercial sex in terms other than pure economic survival. The proponents of these new terms also aim to avoid the so-called essentialism of words like prostitution and sex work. They correctly point out that these activities (particularly when practised by women) have since ancient times been understood in terms of identity, not mere occupations. But this is not inherent in prostitution. In numerous (past and present) cultures, the link between one’s/somebody else’s job and identity is very strong. ²⁹

This conceptual overview demonstrates that there is no single word that encompasses the complexity of commercial sexualities. ³⁰ The new lexicon is a welcome warning against the myths, generalizations, and oversimplifications that abound whenever commercial sex is discussed. This has been achieved through the bottom-up approach of research initiatives that include the points of view of the people directly involved in these activities. Yet the danger of deconstructing the use of sexuality in the exchange of material or non-material benefits is that some “sexual-affective-economic activities” ³¹ become romanticized as feelings or companionship are stressed at the expense of economic considerations. After all, we should keep in mind that authorities, jurists, doctors, and social workers were and are not the only ones who seek to construct commercial sexualities within the scope of single terms such as “fornication”, “whoredom”, or “prostitution”. The actors who are involved themselves contribute to the creation of new discourses which attempt (but often fail) to draw a radical distinction between prostitution, sex work, sexual barter, and transactional or tactical sex. Indeed, as Amalia Cabezas compellingly states, “the exchange of goods and money for sexual services is not an unambiguous commercial endeavour but a discursive construction that is contested and in motion, changing across time and space.” ³²

So for the sake of clarity, the traditional words “prostitution/prostitute” will be continued to be used here. Prostitution is more straightforward than the terms sex work, transactional sex, treating, and so on, even though all of them refer to “a sexual exchange for money or other valuables.” ³³ It is also a concept that appears in the legislation and popular writings of most countries. Admittedly, as various authors in this book point out, “prostitution” and “prostitute” (and its foreign equivalents) became widely used only after the end of the eighteenth century to differentiate the sale of sex from simple fornication and adulterous behaviour. But their origins lay in antiquity. Both words are based on the Latin terms prostituere or prostare which referred to methods and places of solicitation: standing in front of a brothel.

Another reason why the maintenance of these terms seems to be justifiable is that they reflect the stigma that has characterized prostitution throughout most of history, or perhaps more accurately, the history of prostitutes. As Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn state in their theory of prostitution, “while attitudes toward prostitution have vacillated between condemnation and laissez-faire, the prostitute herself has suffered a consistently poor reputation.” ³⁴ Indeed, although some forms of high-level prostitution in earlier times commanded respect and prestige, most societies have treated prostitutes with contempt. At times, they were seen as being part of the working class but the efforts made to differentiate “good” from “bad” women seem to have been ubiquitous. From antiquity to the present, the use of distinguishable clothing or ornaments and zoning laws have served the purpose of singling out and keeping sex workers at a safe distance from “respectable” society.

The poor reputation of prostitution has deep roots. Throughout time and space the notions used to describe commercial sexualities have nearly always involved a condemnation of atypical sex acts. In spite of the geographical and time differences in the way the sex trade has been practised and policed, the available literature demonstrates that sexual desire has been deemed disruptive in most cultures. As it became increasingly commodified with the rise of industrial societies, the nation-state, and globalization, commercial sex became a constant preoccupation of elites and the bourgeoisie. Particularly women using sex for purposes other than (future) procreation were (and still are in many places) openly or less openly incriminated. ³⁵ Female promiscuity has been commonly condemned in all patriarchal societies as it threatens the ability to ascertain paternity on the part of men and, from women’s point of view, to secure faithful and healthy husbands or partners. Moreover, the nexus between female licentiousness and financial or material gain exacerbates the anxiety of men in their traditional roles as family heads and breadwinners. In short, the “female capacity of opportunistic promiscuity threatens the very premise of the patriarchal family, and the prostitute is a constant reminder of this ability.” ³⁶

However, since the nineteenth century the vilification of sex workers has increasingly made room for victimization. The increasing commercialization of sexual activities in capitalist societies seems to have run parallel with an increased sense of moral opprobrium, either because it is associated with wantonness, unruly behaviour, and laziness or because it is understood to be a violation of women’s dignity. Indeed, the notion of the “fallen woman” could refer to the sinful or unruly behaviour for which she is responsible, but also to situations of vulnerability in which women fall prey to malevolent men. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, women involved in prostitution have been increasingly perceived as victims in western countries where the feminist movement gained ground. In Great Britain, feminists and libertarians helped publicize a series of sexual scandals in the 1880s which ended with the reporting on Jack the Ripper and the murder of five prostitutes. William Stead’s publication of newspaper articles about the abduction of English girls who were then sold to continental brothels, in addition to the media attention given to the Ripper murders, rendered all men suspect and strengthened the notions of urban danger and female fragility. ³⁷ The link between (migration for) prostitution, male violence, economic oppression, and trafficking was established in this way; by the end of the nineteenth century, a movement for the suppression of the “white slave traffic” ³⁸ emerged in Britain and spread internationally. Since the early twentieth century, national and international initiatives to curtail female trafficking have gone in crescendo, and the view of prostitution as a harmful activity in which women are the main victims has become increasingly influential. ³⁹

The idea of “unusual sexuality” and the perception of sex workers as threats or victims have not only reinforced the bad reputation of prostitution, but they have also made it more difficult to study. Until recently, very few persons directly involved in the sex trade left first-hand accounts of their activities and motivations. Scientific analyses containing information about the social backgrounds and the working and living conditions of prostitutes in the past are usually based on sources (such as police records, judicial files, medical reports, data collected by relief institutions, newspapers clippings, and so on) that are inevitably incomplete and biased. What is more, in contrast to the analysis of other forms of work, it appears that the study of prostitution is also heavily influenced by emotions and personal views about female sexuality and intimacy. ⁴⁰ Because sexuality evokes both empowerment and vulnerability, the bodily contact involved in prostitution can be seen as a reminder of women’s capacity to adapt to harsh life circumstances, or as the quintessential symbol of female oppression. In both cases, the reputation of the trade is to a greater or lesser extent tarnished as the participants’ consent is repeatedly put into question.

Many authors, policy makers, and activists argue that consent in prostitution is impossible or at least highly problematic. Inspired by radical feminism, some claim that prostitution is always coercive because no person can ever consent to rape. Women’s consent to prostitution would simply be another sign of their “multi-layered oppression” and submission to male supremacy and violence. ⁴¹ This is the logic behind the criminalization of purchasing sex, a move that was first made in Sweden at the end of the 1990s followed by a few other countries in subsequent decades and passed by the European Parliament as a non-binding resolution in 2014. ⁴² Others do not go as far as to equate prostitution with rape or sexual slavery but stress the gendered socioeconomic factors that push many women into prostitution. Even observers who treat prostitution as a form of work often specify that it is not a job like any other or create new concepts to draw a line of demarcation between sex work and other sexual-economic relationships. By doing so, they unwillingly reinforce the poor reputation of prostitution as well as the idea that real consent to this kind of unconventional occupation is unlikely. ⁴³

Since consent, agency, and coercion are dealt with in two separate chapters in this book, we wish here only to specify why the issue is so important to sex workers and highlight the argument that consent to sex work is no less possible than consent to other (substandard or stigmatized) jobs. As stated above, some writers have argued that prostitution is so traumatizing that it is impossible to really consent to it, and that by consequence prostitution always lacks consent. Yet there is no lack of (past and contemporary) statements by women who insist that they work in the sex industry voluntarily. We do not deny that some women are forced to work in the sex trade. We also acknowledge that many women (and men) accept jobs under unfavourable circumstances, and only have unattractive options from which to choose. Many workers, both historically and today, have had to accept jobs which involved risks (including sexual harassment) or were unhealthy or demeaning. ⁴⁴ Hence we see no reason to treat sex work as a special case, unequal to all other kinds of work, ⁴⁵ or to disregard the voices of women who say that sex work was their choice among the options available to them. Acknowledgement of the existence of consent and agency in prostitution strengthens the view of prostitutes as workers and could facilitate the legalization of sex work and subsequent protection of the trade’s employees. ⁴⁶

The problem with this broad understanding of trafficking and its blending with the migration of women who are in “a position of vulnerability” is that it reifies the mental binaries of victim/perpetrator without taking into account the fluidity and complexity of labour relationships in the sex trade (as well as in other economic activities). This approach easily negates the agency of migrant workers who often respond to push factors “rather than the pull factor of trafficker enticement.” ⁵² It also simplifies labour arrangements which often result in both progress and subjugation as well as improvements in workers’ economic opportunities, and at the same time subjects them to exploitative working conditions. ⁵³

Human trafficking is therefore an ambiguous notion that requires further empirical research ⁵⁴ and that has, in our view, no linear relation with prostitution. Just like issues of concepts, policies, race, ethnicity, class, health, violence, space, the role of war, and male concentrations in industrial, military, and administrative hubs, forced (migration for) prostitution is a theme that appears in all the contributions to this book but receives no special treatment in a separate comparative chapter.

The volume is divided into two parts, one containing twenty-three urban overviews while the other includes eight thematic papers. All the authors of the urban essays were required to cover prostitution in the city or town in question between 1600 and the present, or for the time it existed if the city did not exist as a town of sufficient size for the full four centuries. As stated above, the authors were instructed to follow a framework document and to answer a set of questions on three broad themes. This explains the (relative) homogeneity of all the urban overviews. Since we were interested in how the history of sex work has been approached in different times and places, as well as in the various legal and cultural definitions used by state and non-state actors in each city, one section of each paper is devoted to historical contextualization, historiography, and definitions. A second theme is related to societal reactions regarding prostitution. Society is here broadly conceptualized and refers to the way that public authorities and private actors have responded to prostitution across time and space. Local, national, and international initiatives to control, regulate, and/or repress the sex trade, as well as the role played by religious and secular organizations in “redeeming” prostitutes or defending their interests, are included in the analyses. The third theme concerns the labour market for prostitution, more precisely the prostitutes’ social profiles; political and socioeconomic factors influencing the sex trade (urbanization, industrialization, colonization, war, demographic transitions, and revolutions in communications and transport); changes in working conditions (indoor or outdoor prostitution, payment systems, prostitution as a part- or full-time activity, relations to other forms of “female occupations”, and so on); the prostitute/employer/client-relationship; and sex workers’ culture (hierarchy, solidarity, organization, self-representation, and views on prostitution). The urban overviews are organized in four regional sections: Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific.

The willingness of the authors to respond to (most of) these issues facilitated the preparation of comparative papers on prostitution in relation to labour relations, working conditions, migration, colonization, agency, coercion, gender, and social profiles. Hence the thematic overviews are based on the results of the different urban papers but the authors were given the liberty to use the available literature and approaches they deemed necessary to discuss the theme under consideration. Inevitably, there is some overlap in the various themes, but we do not consider this to be a problem. On the contrary, the interrelation between various issues—for example, migration and working conditions or gender and colonization—adds to a better understanding of the complexity of prostitution.

The intricacy of the subject, combined with the almost complete lack of information for many periods, places, and actors, results in a global history that does not cover each corner of the globe or each period to the same degree. We have covered every region of the world, but sub-Saharan Africa is underrepresented. Information about many ex-colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia for the period before the nineteenth century, as well as on prostitution in rural or suburban areas is often unavailable. Similarly, historical data about male and underage prostitutes or on clients and third parties is even more scarce than material on female sex workers. Yet, as is demonstrated in the concluding chapter, the cities and themes included in this volume provide a solid basis for a global history of prostitution and we are confident that they also make a valuable contribution to a more comprehensive understanding of the world of labour.