The fox and the flies

by Charles Van Onselen

The nineteenth-century was the age of industry, witnessing extraordinary advances in manufacturing, trade and communications. Exploiting the new infrastructure of railways, steamships and telegraph systems, European pimps and 'white slave' traffickers were hugely successful in establishing an integrated global market for commercial sex. In the newly developed industrialised economy, criminal syndicates in capital cities such as Buenos Aires, Cape Town, New York, London and Rio de Janeiro, were able to commission the seduction or rape of women by agents in under-developed parts of Europe and 'export' them as prostitutes to meet the insatiable demand for sexual services throughout the Atlantic world. For three turbulent decades before the First World War Joseph Silver - brothel-owner, pimp and trafficker in women on four continents - was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust and sexual slavery. Burglar, gun-runner, jewel-thief, rapist, safe-cracker and sodomist, Silver