Black Market Business

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.

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.

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.

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.

Micheline Lessard, University of Ottawa, author of Human Trafficking in Colonial Vietnam:

Christina Elizabeth Firpo is the most qualified historian to write a book on this subject. Black Market Business analyzes prostitution in colonial Vietnam in a completely new way, making this a major and significant contribution.

Charles Keith, Michigan State University, author of Catholic Vietnam:

Black Market Business illuminates some of the most marginal and most poorly understood social types and spaces in the history of colonial Indochina, while connecting their histories to broader questions about gender, colonial power, and urban life. The field is lucky to have this book.