Gunther Peck

This projects explores how European and North American workers, immigrants, feminists, fiction writers, policy makers, and border bureaucrats transformed white slavery from a critique of emerging wage relations in the 1820s and 1830s to a campaign against immigrant prostitutes in the 1910s. I place changes in the meanings and social uses of white slavery in the comparative and transnational context that gave the metaphor its particular urgency and significance to reformers and policy makers before and after black emancipation in the Atlantic world.