Episode Details

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.