In the early 20th century Cairo was a vibrant and booming global metropolis. The integration of Egypt into the global market had led to rapid urban growth and increased migration. As occupational prospects for women outside the family were limited, sex work became a prominent feature of the new modern city. However, the economic and social changes in Egypt ignited national anxieties about racial degeneration, social disorder and imperial decadence. Francesca Biancani argues here that this was a period of national crisis that became inscribed on the bodies on female sex workers. Based on a wide range of rare primary sources, including documents from court cases, reformist papers, police minutes and letters, Biancani examines the discourses around sex workers and shows how prostitution was understood in colonial Egypt. The book argues that from initially regulating and managing prostitution, local and colonial elites began to depict sex workers as a threat to the physical and moral welfare of the rising Egyptian nation. However, far from being a marginal activity, prostitution is shown to play a central role in the history of Egyptian nation-making. By exploring the interdependence of power and marginality, respectability and transgression, Biancani writes sex work and its practitioners back into the history of modern Egypt. The book is an original contribution to the global history of prostitution and a vital resource for scholars of Middle East Studies.

Selling Sex in the City offers a worldwide analysis of prostitution since 1600. It analyses more than 20 cities with an important sex industry and compares policies and social trends, coercion and agency, but also prostitutes' working and living conditions.

Illustrated by interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt, this book opens up the debate surrounding sex tourism by examining the way in which holiday romances between western women and 'native' men are linked to a much wider romanticism of place and people, which is used to sell these destinations. The work provides insights into gender issues to do with globalization, travel and sexuality.

Egypt just before political eruption! Turns of the century in Africa's northeastern corner have been critical moments, ushering in overt popular activism in the hope of radical political redirection--as this volume's focus on Egypt's 19th-century fin-de-siecle demonstrates. The end of the 19th century in Egypt witnessed crisscrossing and conflicting political currents as well as fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social conditions, demographic conditions and cultural processes. Like Egypt's 20th-century fin-de-siecle, much of this ferment was a prelude to the more visible and politically eruptive events of the next decades, when Egypt's popular resistance burst onto the international scene. But its subterranean cast was no less dynamic for that.

Policing Egyptian Women delineates the intricate manner in which the modern state in Egypt monitored, controlled, and "policed" the bodies of subaltern women. Some of these women were runaway slaves, others were deflowered outside of marriage, and still others were prostitutes. Kozma traces the effects of nineteenth-century developments such as the expansion of cities, the abolition of the slave trade, the formation of a new legal system, and the development of a new forensic medical expertise on these women who lived at the margins of society.

Describes how attempts to create a modern Egyptian self free from the colonial gaze were enacted through discourses of gender and sexuality during the British colonial period.

Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.

Global Women, Colonial Ports is a transnational history of state-regulated prostitution in the Middle East and North Africa between the two world wars. Beginning with international efforts to eradicate traffic in women and children, Liat Kozma examines French and British policies regarding local and foreign prostitutes in the region and shows how these policies affected and interacted with global migration routes of prostitutes and procurers. In so doing, she reveals how colonial domination mediated global mobility of people, practices, and ideas. Kozma weaves together the perspectives of colonial and local feminists with those of medical doctors, demonstrating that debates on prostitution were globalized and that transnational networks of knowledge and activism existed. She also explores the League of Nations' involvement in this social issue. As a history of the Middle East, the book joins recent scholarship on modern globalization and the integration of the region in global economic, activist, social, and religious interconnectedness.

An intimate account of the Arab Spring, and Egypt’s past and present, seen through the eyes of a wide range of Egyptians: political operators, archaeologists and garbage collectors; women, the queer community and migrants.

Among the groups of workers whose labour built Singapore in the 20th century were women who travelled from China and Japan to work in Singapore as prostitutes. This study explores the trade in women and children in Asia, and looks at the daily lives of prostitutes in the colonial city.