What happens to the already brutal economics of commercial sex when you add the logic of empire — the idea that an entire category of people exists for the use and benefit of another?
The answer, as this episode will show you, is that you get something considerably worse. Not just worse in scale, though the scale is staggering. Worse in a more fundamental way: the addition of racial ideology to economic exploitation creates a system in which the most basic claims to human dignity can be dismissed not just through power — that happens everywhere, in every era — but through the pretense of natural order. If racial hierarchy is real, if certain people are genuinely lesser by nature, then their exploitation is not injustice. It is just the way things are.
That pretense did not hold philosophically — it collapsed every time a real human being looked at it clearly. But it was politically and economically useful enough that empires maintained it for centuries.
The Colonial Port Economy
The first thing European colonial expansion produced, almost everywhere it landed, was a commercial sex economy around its port towns and garrison outposts.
The mechanism was consistent. European trading companies — the Portuguese Estado da India, the Dutch VOC, the British East India Company — established fortified trading posts at strategic points around the coastline of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. These posts required labor, defense, and administration. They attracted European soldiers, sailors, and administrators, mostly young men who were far from home for extended periods. They disrupted local economies and social structures in ways that pushed local women into economic desperation. And commercial sex followed with the reliability of a mathematical function.
In Goa, the Portuguese headquarters on the western coast of India, a commercial sex economy developed almost immediately after the Portuguese establishment of control in 1510. The Portuguese administration initially attempted to manage this through a policy of encouraging intermarriage between Portuguese men and local women — a policy called mestiçagem, based partly on pragmatic manpower needs and partly on a specific Portuguese colonial ideology that was somewhat less rigidly segregationist than other European colonial systems. Local women who married Portuguese men and converted to Christianity were granted specific legal protections. Women who did not occupy that protected category were in a considerably more precarious position.
In Batavia, the Dutch colonial headquarters in what is now Jakarta, the VOC created what was essentially a slave society that included organized commercial sex as a structural feature. Enslaved women from various parts of Asia were brought to Batavia to serve as domestic labor and, frequently, as sexual partners for Dutch officials and merchants. The children born of these relationships occupied an ambiguous social position — neither fully accepted in Dutch colonial society nor fully protected by local social structures. The mixed-race population that colonial port towns produced became, across multiple generations, a distinct social category with its own particular vulnerabilities.
This pattern repeated itself, with local variations, at Portuguese Macau, at British Penang and Singapore, at French Saigon, at Dutch Batavia, at Spanish Manila. Every colonial port town had its commercial sex economy. Every colonial commercial sex economy was organized around racial hierarchy. The bodies of colonized women were available. The bodies of European women were protected. The difference was not economic. It was racial. And it was explicit.
The Americas: Plantation Slavery and Sexual Violence as System
The colonial experience in the Americas was, in terms of the scale and institutionalization of sexual exploitation, something in its own terrible category.
The system of plantation slavery that European powers — primarily the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch — established across the Caribbean and the American continents from the sixteenth century onward was a system of total human commodification. Enslaved people were property. Their bodies were property. Their labor was property. Their children were property — and crucially, in most American slave societies, the children of enslaved women inherited their mother's slave status regardless of the father's identity.
This last legal provision had a specific consequence that should be named directly: it meant that enslaving men who then fathered children with enslaved women produced more enslaved children, and therefore more property, for the enslaver. Sexual access to enslaved women was not just a personal practice of abuse. It was an economic mechanism for expanding the slave population. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women was built into the profit structure of American plantation slavery at the level of property law.
The rape of enslaved women in the American plantation system was not criminalized. In most American slave societies, it was not legally possible — because rape required that the victim have a legal status that could be violated, and enslaved people had no such status. The enslaved woman had no legal personhood that the law protected from sexual assault. This was not an oversight. It was the system operating as designed.
What this means historically is that we are not talking about individual crimes against individual women, terrible as those were. We are talking about a system of institutionalized sexual violence that operated at an industrial scale for more than two centuries, that was explicitly protected by law, and that was defended by an entire cultural and religious apparatus designed to explain why it was natural and appropriate. That apparatus included theological arguments, pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies, and an elaborate sentimental literature about the beneficence of enslavers and the contentment of the enslaved, all of which collapsed at the first serious examination but was politically useful enough to sustain.
The African Continent: Colonial Garrisons and Disrupted Economies
European colonialism's arrival in sub-Saharan Africa, accelerating dramatically in the nineteenth century during what historians call the Scramble for Africa, produced its own specific commercial sex economies.
Colonial administration and military presence required a support infrastructure, and commercial sex was part of that infrastructure. In British East Africa, in French West Africa, in the Belgian Congo, in German South-West Africa — in every colonial possession — the presence of a military garrison and an administrative apparatus generated demand that displaced local women, pushed out of traditional economic structures by the disruption of colonial rule, frequently met.
The colonial medical establishment was particularly active in organizing and regulating these systems. The British, in particular, had developed what they considered a sophisticated approach to managing venereal disease in garrison towns, drawing on their Indian colonial experience with the Contagious Diseases Acts — a set of regulations we'll explore in more detail in the next episode. The short version is: European soldiers needed to be protected from disease. The women who served them needed to be inspected and controlled. Nobody asked whether the women needed to be protected from anything.
Colonial anthropology contributed its own specific poison to the mix. The pseudo-scientific racial theories of the nineteenth century produced an extensive literature claiming that African women were naturally more sexually available, naturally more sexually aggressive, and naturally less harmed by sexual contact with multiple partners than European women. This literature — produced by European men about women they had largely encountered only in the context of colonial power relationships — was used to justify the sexual exploitation of colonized women as being in accordance with their natural character. It was, obviously, self-serving nonsense. It was also enormously influential, and some of its assumptions persist in attenuated form to the present day.
Japanese Imperial Expansion: The Comfort Women
The system of what the Japanese military euphemistically called "comfort stations" — ianjo in Japanese — and the women forced into them, the ianfu or "comfort women," represents one of the most extensively documented cases of state-organized sexual slavery in the twentieth century.
From approximately the early 1930s through the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army organized a system of sexual labor stations attached to military installations across the territories it occupied — China, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Women were recruited, or more accurately coerced, into this system through a combination of deception, economic pressure, outright kidnapping, and the application of direct military force in occupied territories.
The majority of the women in the system were Korean — Korea being under Japanese colonial rule since 1910. Estimates of the total number of women involved range from under one hundred thousand to several hundred thousand, a range that reflects not uncertainty about the scale but the deliberate destruction of many relevant records at the end of the war. Women were kept in conditions of severe physical abuse, denied medical care, prevented from leaving, and subjected to what their testimony consistently describes as mass rape on a systematic daily basis by Japanese military personnel.
What makes the comfort women system particularly significant as a historical case is several things. First, it was explicitly organized and administered by a state military apparatus — this was not commercial sex operating in the shadow of military activity, it was a military logistics system. Second, the women in it were disproportionately from colonized populations — Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian — which illustrates directly the intersection of racial hierarchy and sexual exploitation that characterized colonial systems more broadly. Third, the Japanese government's response to demands for acknowledgment and reparation in the decades after the war — a combination of denial, minimization, and incomplete acknowledgment — became one of the most painful diplomatic and human rights issues in East Asian international relations, and remains contested today.
The comfort women's story is one of the most painful in this entire series. It belongs here not as a curiosity or as an example of foreign barbarism but as a case study in what happens when states combine imperial power, racial ideology, and the organized commodification of bodies — and in what it costs real human beings when that combination is allowed to operate without consequence.
The Long Colonial Inheritance
There is a direct line between the colonial sexual economy of the fifteenth through twentieth centuries and the contemporary global sex trafficking map. The countries that were most thoroughly colonized, whose economies were most thoroughly disrupted, whose traditional social structures were most completely shattered by European and Japanese imperial expansion — these are, in many cases, the countries that today are primary sources in global sex trafficking networks. The Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, parts of West Africa, parts of Latin America — the correlation between historical colonial disruption and contemporary trafficking vulnerability is not coincidental.
This is not a counsel of despair. Causation is not destiny. But understanding how we got here is a precondition for understanding what would actually have to change to get somewhere better.
In the next episode, we are going back to Europe — specifically to Victorian Britain, which produced one of history's most elaborate, most documented, and most hypocritical systems of managing the contradiction between public moral standards and the private demand for commercial sex. It is a story that involves cholera, Parliament, underground networks, child exploitation, and one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism in the nineteenth century. It is, in many ways, where the modern debate begins.
Discussion Questions
How did racial ideology allow colonial powers to reframe sexual exploitation as natural order? What contemporary language performs a similar function today?
The American plantation system's exploitation of enslaved women was not just personal abuse — it was an economic mechanism built into property law. How does understanding exploitation as systemic rather than individual change our moral and legal analysis?
Japan's comfort women system was state-organized sexual slavery that targeted women from colonized populations. Why do you think the full historical acknowledgment of this system has been so politically contested?
Looking at the colonial origins of contemporary sex trafficking geography, what would a genuine reparative approach to this history look like in practice?
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