2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This workshop session is intended to present and help to develop emerging work in the field of the history of trafficking. Early histories of trafficking have placed their analysis firmly within the field of prostitution. Today, we are witnessing a significant broadening of public and political understandings of trafficking, and historians too have recently begun to challenge the borders that have been drawn in the historical study of trafficking, and to consider the ways in which the history of ‘the traffic in women’ is intimately related to histories of global labour, slavery and unfree labour, and migration and migration control, as well as to prostitution and sexuality.  Simultaneously, scholars in this field are beginning to move beyond the more well-charted territory of early twentieth century histories of trafficking in the West, to examine trafficking in the global south, in imperial contexts, and in early and later periods.

This workshop is the product of this emerging and challenging work, and aims to bring together a network of scholars who initially encountered each other at Berks 2014 in Toronto.  The workshop will critically engage with the concept of trafficking in the past by exploring the way in which it was entangled with labour and migration more broadly.  Participants will examine the methodological, thematic, theoretical, and literal border crossings of new work in this field, and reflect upon the contemporary relevance of trafficking histories to the fraught and complex discussions that are happening amongst anti-trafficking organisations in the present day.