Black Market Business is a grassroots social history of the clandestine market for sex in colonial Tonkin. Lively and well told, it explores the ways in which sex workers, managers, and clients evaded the colonial regulation system in the turbulent economy of the interwar years. Christina Elizabeth Firpo argues that the confluence of economic, demographic, and cultural changes sweeping late colonial Tonkin created spaces of tension in which the interwar black market sex industry thrived. The clandestine sex industry flourished in sites of legal inconsistency, cultural changes, economic disparity, rural-urban division, and demographic shifts. As a nexus of the many tensions besetting late colonial Tonkin, the black market sex industry serves as a useful lens through which to examine these tensions and the ways they affected marginalized populations. More specifically, an investigation of this black market shows how a particular population of impoverished women-a group regrettably understudied by historians-experienced the tensions.

Drawing on an astonishingly diverse and multilingual source base, Black Market Business includes detailed cases of juvenile prostitution, human trafficking, and debt bondage arrangements in sex work, as well as cases in Tonkin's bars, hotels, singing houses, and dance clubs. Using GIS technology and big data sets to track individual actors in history, it serves as a model for teaching new methodological approaches to conducting social histories of women and marginalized people.

About the Author

Christina Elizabeth Firpo is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University. She is author of The Uprooted, awarded the 2017 International Convention of Asian Scholars Colleague's Choice Book.

Reviews

Firpo (California Polytechnic State Univ.), author of The Uprooted: Race, Childhood, and Imperialism in Indochina, 1890-1980, provocatively argues that French colonial rule gave rise to a black market for sex in Northern Vietnam.

* Choice *

Christina Firpo's latest book is a lively social history of the black market sex industry in late French colonial northern Vietnam, known then as Tonkin (1920-45). Black Market Business is an absorbing historical study[.][T]his rigorously researched study testifies to Firpo's high scholarly calibre. Accessibly and lucidly written, the book will be of interest to general readers, students and scholars alike from many disciplines, including anthropology, criminology, law, literature and cultural studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies.

* Sojourn *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501752650
Author Christina Elizabeth Firpo
Format Hardback
Page Count 276
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm