Introduction

1A sailor when afloat, and especially on foreign stations, is exposed to peculiar temptations. He is a bird of passage who visits many different ports for short periods, where he is unfamiliar with the language and local conditions. He is usually made welcome wherever he goes, but unfortunately not always by the right sort of person. He is often shown round the town by individuals of doubtful character, who initiate the tour by taking him into a low class drinking shop where liquor of an inferior quality and unfamiliar potency is consumed, but not by the guides¹.

2Historians of prostitution and venereal disease concentrate mainly on the policing of the body of the prostitute, and with good reason². Nineteenth and earlier twentieth century medical and regulatory discourse and practice regarding prostitution and venereal disease focused, in large part, on the body of marginalized women. It was invaded, inspected, disinfected, confined and treated. Following World War I, however, medical discourse and practice increasingly dealt also with the ability to contain and channel the sexuality of young men on the move. Seçil Yilmaz demonstrates how Ottoman anxieties about venereal disease were translated into multiple means of scrutinizing and controlling male sexuality³. She argues that whereas middle-class men were encouraged to subject themselves to self-disciplining measures, the sexuality of working-class migrants was subjected to state control. Focusing on a somewhat different time period and imperial context, this article examines interwar gendered practices of regulating the sexuality of a specific category of clients: men on the move.

3The motivation for mobility, its rhythm, speed and routes reflects and is constitutive of power relations. Focusing on mobilities that governments and the media deem problematic enables in-depth examination of social transformation through globalization. Such an analysis takes into account gender relations, as mobilities were experienced and practiced differently by men and women, whose mobilities were also regimented differently⁴. My question from here is why was the mobility of specific categories of men problematized almost as much as the mobility of women, and much more than the mobility of other men and potential patrons?

4Epidemics are useful analytic axis because they dramatize the necessity and danger of human contacts and the perils of human interdependence in an increasingly interdependent world. Outbreak narratives affect survival rates and contagion routes, and they promote stigmatization of people, behaviors and life styles. Contagion theories turned individual interactions into potentially fatal on a global scale. Quarantine marks an effort to put a fence around an entire nation, thus imagining the nation as a discrete ecosystem. Epidemics also create boundaries of the community and define who is worthy of protection and who is not. Epidemics serve as equalizers, and raise anxiety because they are evidence of shared humanity – of moving through the same shrinking world – and as evidence of human interactions. Epidemics mark the threat of populations in new proximity⁵. Venereal disease are central to the story of mobility and differences because they are deeply invested in unmediated human contact.

5This article examines how colonial and international authorities sought to contain the damages, or presumed damages, resulting from soldiers’ and sailors’ interaction with prostitutes. Their containment strategies were ambiguous, I argue, because such interactions were seen, on the one hand, as inevitable, and on the other as undermining soldiers’ health and discipline, as well as national or military prestige. Men on the move were particularly subject to national and international regulation because of their potential to carry microbes and parasites to their next station or port of call. As low-ranking soldiers or workers, they could be effectively policed and monitored. Within their military or labor hierarchies, they were subjected to measures that could not be applied to the general population.

6I concentrate on the interwar period for several reasons. First, because of the massive challenge of postwar demobilization that entailed mass mobility of men, and involved months and sometimes years of waiting. Second, it was a period in which gender norms were reconsidered in Europe. Millions of men were lost in the war, and millions more still carried physical and mental scars. They returned to wives who had to give up their wartime independence. Shell-shocked men and emancipated women called for new discussions on gender roles and gendered bodies⁶. Third, in the first decade of the 20th century, two discoveries – the Wasserman test and the drug Salvarsan – made syphilis both diagnosable and treatable, which made public investment in prevention, education and treatment necessary and worthwhile. Unlike penicillin, however, which was introduced only after WWII and involved only a short treatment, Salvarsan required months of injections and protracted follow-up, which men were often reluctant to collaborate with⁷.

7This article first situates interwar discussions on venereal disease within the larger context of gendered discourse in the British and French Empires. It then examines French and British discussions of regulation and their respective understandings of male sexuality and the capacity to educate lower-class men. From here, I zoom in to three examples of British and French attempts to contain venereal disease and hence the sexuality of lower-class men: British-colonized Egypt and Palestine, and French-colonized Morocco. The final section turns to sailors, another internationally mobile population which resorted to prostitutes. These sexual interactions and their medical consequences became a matter of international policy, as embodied in the International Labor Organization.

Venereal Disease and Imperial Masculinity

8In April 1915, following rumors that Egyptians had stabbed an Australian soldier, a crowd of drunken soldiers opened fire in Cairo’s infamous wasaa brothel district, threw prostitutes out of windows, and accidently killed an Egyptian boy⁸. In February 1935, the French police intervened in a brothel brawl in Sétif, Algeria, involving indigenous soldiers and civilians, and subsequently killed several men, which led to anti-French demonstrations⁹. British and French supporters of the abolition of regulated prostitution saw both incidents as indications of its destabilizing effects of regulated prostitution in North Africa. These events are significant to our discussion because they place clients, rather than prostitutes, at center stage: the clients lost control, and it was the presence of prostitutes (and presumably alcohol as well) that made them volatile and dangerous to others.

9In Egypt and Algeria, as elsewhere, management of the sexual practices of colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things. In the Indies, for example, relationship between subaltern men and Asian women were initially encouraged by the state. Concubinage was still upheld as European middle-class privilege in colonial cultures in the 1880s, but undermined by the beginning of the twentieth century, and was replaced by more restricted sexual access in the politically safe context of prostitution. In this context, lower-class men were a convenient other for the emerging middle class and its dream of sober, hard-working men and respectable families. The very Europeaness of these men was constantly questioned. Colonial projects entailed domesticating and disciplining working-class men by encouraging them to abandon dance houses and sailor pubs in favor of respectable models of masculinity. The British East Indies company, for example, legally and administratively dissuaded lower-class European migration, with the argument that it might destroy Indian respect for the “superiority of the European character”. Colonial politics locked European men and women into routinized protection of their physical health and social space, in ways which bound gender prescriptions to class conventions thereby fixing the racial cleavage between “us” and “them¹⁰”.

10Britain and France had distinctly different policies on venereal disease and prostitution, and different expectations from young men, especially overseas. These policies entailed different notions of male and female sexuality, and men and women’s respective capability for “self-restraint”, which were also class‑specific.

11A steady rise in VD rates in the British forces led to the 1864 Contagious Disease Act, which mandated regulated prostitution in several garrison towns¹¹. The act was repealed two decades later following feminist and conservative protest, but VD remained a pressing concern in the British army, especially overseas, as prostitution was associated with both disease and disorder. In the latter decades of the 19th century, and following the abolition of regulated prostitution, the British soldier became the target of moral reform. Abstinence came to be seen as both a medical and a moral imperative. Self-discipline was a means to prepare the young soldier for battle as well as for productive citizenship. Alcohol and brothels were frowned upon, and army bases were equipped with libraries, gymnasia and workshops, as alternatives recreation venues¹².

12Conversely, the turn-of-the century French logic of regulation saw male youth as lacking the experience and reason required for self-restraint. Male heterosexual desire was thus portrayed as normal and healthy, and also at constant risk. Unlike their British counterparts, French soldiers were not expected to remain chaste, but their sexual behavior did involve a constant risk of contamination. They were among the first targets of anti-VD propaganda, as men no longer constrained by patriarchal authority but not yet ready for marriage. Soldiers were considered to be particularly at risk because they were isolated from society with other men, because they shared a spirit of independence and discipline and might bring disease back home, thus infecting an entire generation of newborns with congenital syphilis. Indeed, their very mobility was a cause of concern to the immobile wives at home. They were therefore subjected to pedagogical hygiene tactics and discipline unthinkable for civilians (or officers). Sexual education and medical confidentiality were means to encourage men to seek treatment. As in the British case, these were accompanied by measures to improve soldiers’ recreation options through reading and game rooms, designed to keep them away from alcohol and prostitution¹³.

13Syphilis became one of the contested challenges of WWI. French doctors relied on regulated prostitution to protect their troops against disease, but also recognized that this protection was ineffective as long as men were not inspected. Sex with prostitutes was considered part of military life, a legitimate distraction from war, and a natural common denominator to male commeradery. The growing rates of syphilis among the soldiers, which they brought back to their wives at home, led French military authorities to intensify regulation measures, but also to educate soldiers about the peril. Soldiers received lectures about syphilis and about its dangers to the offspring and were encouraged to seek treatment. Restricting men’s sexual conduct did not conform to French norms of masculinity, however: even when prophylactic stations were created toward the end of the war, they were not obligatory¹⁴.

14Although entailing different policies, then, both the British and French empires were clearly concerned with the radical mobility of subaltern men, and devised radical means to contain it. The incidents in Cairo and Sétif and the public debate they initiated, are indicative of how the sexuality of these subaltern colonial men was problematized and debated. As self-control was seen as a bourgeois project, lower-class men had to be educated or coerced into containing the damage they were posing to the empire and its future. Mass recruitment also meant a new challenge, of lower-class men, who were not confronted with bourgeois ideals of masculinity. Their unruly behavior threatened both military discipline and imperial prestige. I now turn to more specific examples of such dilemmas in colonized Egypt, Palestine and Morocco. I demonstrate here the solutions devised in various colonial contexts to contain the implications of young men’s sexuality.

Egyptian brothels and the challenge of Demobilization

15WWI and its immediate aftermath brought particular challenges to Egyptian cities. Egypt served as a rear base for British and commonwealth soldiers; they were stationed there throughout the war, and many lingered during the months and years of demobilization. The interactions between British soldiers and local prostitutes were of much concern to military authorities and civilian critics¹⁵.

16Prostitution had been regulated in Egypt since the 1882 British occupation. Egyptian prostitutes were registered, had to undergo weekly medical inspection, and their residential choices were restricted to state-regulated brothels. These measures were designed to protect the wellbeing of British soldiers, and to contain the spread of venereal diseases in Egypt more generally¹⁶.

17The war years witnessed a debate between three approaches within the British military: regulated prostitution, sexual abstinence, and the provision of prophylactics – none of which was problem-free. The first approach was controversial in Britain itself, sexual abstinence was not realistic and prophylaxis was seen as encouraging vice. British military officers, moreover, saw Egypt, and the East in general, as a realm of contamination – and the type of syphilis contracted in the East as more fatal than the one contracted in Europe. In this racial discourse, anxieties about interracial sex were translated into presumed medical danger. On the Egyptian side, meanwhile, the presence of British and ANZAC troops was identified as contaminating Egyptian society. Indeed, the regulation of prostitution became a target of local anti-British and feminist criticism. The abolition of regulated prostitution was one of the goals of the new Egyptian Feminist Union from its foundation in 1923¹⁷.

18More specifically, the port city of Port Said served, for British troops, a social laboratory in abolitionism in a context of state regulation. A transit town for soldiers, sailors, pilgrims and tourists, Port Said had been seen, for decades, as source of social, political and medical contamination¹⁸, and British military authorities decided to clean it up. Shortly after WWI was declared, 16 European brothels were shut down, although one remained in Babel Street, which was operated by foreigners under the protection of European consuls. Colonel Elgood, the commander of the British troops in Port Said, had to negotiate brothels’ closure with foreign diplomats, some of whom were economically invested in them. The brothels in the Arab neighborhoods, however, remained open. In 1916, Elgood banned the city’s red light district to his troops¹⁹.

19In 1919, shortly after the armistice, the French medical service in Palestine reported enviously that the British military authorities in Port Said managed to keep brothels out of bounds for soldiers. Venereal infections, which French medical authorities claimed to be rampant among Algerian and Tunisian soldiers of the French army, were reduced upon arrival to Port Said. All the prostitutes were reportedly driven out of the Europeans quarters and restricted to the indigenous ones, where they were examined regularly, as well as treated and isolated when sick. In spite of these precautions, the British commander saw it appropriate to ban access to the reserved quarter to all the troops. According to this French report, the result was zero syphilis infections during their stay in Port Said²⁰.

20As British occupation forces remained in Egypt in the post-war years, their interaction with prostitutes became the concern of Britain’s abolitionist coalition. For example, the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene was very concerned with the fact (or rumor) that certain brothels in Cairo were declared permissible for British soldiers, and that soldiers were punished if they frequented others. The allegation was that British military doctors were examining the prostitutes in these particular brothels and giving them a seal of approval. The military denied these allegations and maintained that all brothels were out of bound for soldiers, but Alison Neilans, the association’s secretary, insisted that it was imperative that the British military in Egypt sever this last link between the British Empire and licensed prostitution. “If this is not done voluntarily it may incur the disgrace of being forcibly deprived of the use of the system by a progressive movement on the part of the Egyptian government”, she concluded. In Cairo, “an officer was appointed as sports-officer to the army and it is now obligatory on all soldiers to engage in sports and games. Since the orders were issued disease has declined by one half”. As elsewhere, sport was seen as a form of distraction, a way of exhausting young men’s bodies while enabling them to prove their masculine prowess in a moral, disease-free way²¹. Sport was designed to improve fitness, toughness, discipline, temperance and sexual restraint, and thus enabling the soldiers to exhibit a sober and chaste model of masculinity –one that would be appropriately representative of the empire in the eyes of the occupied population²².

21Egypt, and particularly Port Said, is an example of regulationist context, in which the military authorities tried to leave the brothels out of bound for soldiers. The debates surrounding this policy raises questions about their effectiveness. The terns of these debates were set by the choice of regulation on the one hand, and the moralizing ethos of abstinence and respectability on the other. How soldiers’ sexual behavior reflected on empire was central to both debate and policy. The next example takes us to an abolitionist context, of Palestine, in which the British Empire had to cope with the gap between its choice to abolish regulation, and the rampant venereal disease rates among its troops.

Haifa

22The mandate authorities in Palestine chose to abolish regulation in the early 1920s, after a few years of regulation following the 1917 military occupation of Palestine. Prostitution was legal, neither regulated nor registered. Procuring and brothel keeping were criminal offences²³. Public dispensaries were therefore instrumental in containing the spread of venereal disease. Patients were laborers, policemen, prisoners, and civil servants such as teachers and post employees. Attendance rates, though, remained low, especially for returning patients. Haifa’s medical officer ascribed the unpopularity of the clinics to the improved economic conditions of the inhabitants, to the large number of private practitioners in town, and to the proximity of Beirut, with its good hospitals, that constituted a substantial competition²⁴.

23As elsewhere, the main challenge mandatory medical authorities faced was to encourage patients to seek treatment and then follow it through. In October 1940, Haifa’s medical officer requested a bus fare allowance for clinic’s assistant in order to enable him to look up patients who failed to complete their treatment. A few weeks later, maybe after his earlier requests were denied, he asked for a bicycle allowance for the same purpose²⁵.

24The question of medical treatment was a bone of contention between the military and civilian authorities. The former wanted the means to impose treatment and discipline defaulters as well as soldiers and policemen who knowingly infected others. At the same time, medical doctors, including Palestine’s senior medical officials, refused to share patients’ privileged information with the military or the police. They insisted that such betrayal of patients’ confidence would be counter-productive, as patients would avoid treatment or resort to private doctors. In one case, Haifa’s senior medical officer was instructed to bring forth a certain policemen, “highly suspected to be suffering from venereal disease”. He was further instructed to notify commanding officers of the policeman’s venereal infection, in order to pursue an investigation as to the source of infection. Haifa’s medical officer strongly objected, and argued that: “The purpose of the government in establishing a chain of clinics for VD treatment would be defeated if disciplinary measures are taken against those contracting it,” he concluded²⁶.

25Doctors insisted on patients’ confidentiality –that of both women and men. In January 1937, for example, the general officer commanding the British Forces in Palestine and Transjordan requested, due to the high rate of venereal disease among the troops in Haifa, that the civil police should be allowed to deal effectively with infected women, as “the protection of men on service abroad appears to me to justify every possible step.” His suggestion, which was rejected by the civilian authorities, was that houses that were identified by soldiers to be the source of infection be raided, the woman infected be identified by the soldier, and the police would be given authority to carry out a medical examination of the woman in question, and a woman infected be removed to a hospital, or to “another town, where there are no troops,” or deported from Palestine. This suggestion was rejected because it entailed measures beyond the law²⁷.

26Another problem the medical officer reported was that the government hospital’s clinic was not discrete enough. It was separated from the other hospital clinics, and thus more visible. Moreover, the patients were exposed in an open waiting room where they could be easily observed: “the open court, used by the clinic as well as by the district health offices as waiting room, is a place of gathering of many people, men and women, who come to the offices for various purposes, as well as by patients suffering from venereal diseases.” The solution is a “less obvious” spot, that would encourage patients to attend the clinic²⁸. In April 1937, the medical authorities decided to encode venereal diseases in their correspondence with the British section of the police: syphilis was Schaudimn’s disease, Gonorrhoea –Neisser’s disease, and soft sores– Granuloma²⁹.

27WWII increased the interactions between British soldiers stationed in Palestine and the city’s prostitutes – and with these, attempts to contain these interactions and their foreseen damages. The result was that examinations were carried out on a voluntary basis by Jewish doctors, but most prostitutes avoided medical supervision, left the brothel and started working in cafés in town or on their own. 8-10 women, mostly Jewish, continued to attend the clinic: “it has been found possible to have these women come regularly on Wednesday mornings, without coming into contact with other patients at all. They are being encouraged to come, and to let others know of the clinic”³⁰. The Department of Health agreed to afford treatment by its women medical officers to any girls sent to their clinics. “There may be difficulty about Jewish women attending our clinics as at present located³¹.”

28In the case of Palestine, then, and specifically, the port city of Haifa, abolition created its own challenges. These included tension between the military and the police on the one hand – these needed means to control their rank and file; and medical authorities on the other hand – as these believed that confidentiality would increase attendance and compliance to treatment. The ability to contain venereal disease was thus an object of power struggle between doctors and military and police personnel, which WWII managed to destabilize. In our next example, French authorities saw regulated prostitution as means to protect their soldiers, while criticism from both abolitionist activists and soldiers themselves urged to reconsider their policy.

French Soldiers and Mobile Brothels

29Immediately after the 1912 French occupation of Morocco, prostitutes were supervised by military doctors and the gendarmerie. In 1914, civil administration replaced the military and placed prostitutes under police supervision. Prostitutes were inspected on a weekly basis for signs of venereal disease. Those found infected were promptly hospitalized. Besides those medical inspections, they also had to report daily to a “health center”, in which they were subjected to preventive disinfection measures. Casablanca’s red light district, Bousbir, was a highly-planned utopia (or dystopia) of regulation: 400 women housed in a small walled-off quarter, regularly inspected and treated if infected³². Presenting Bousbir in Cairo’s annual conference of the International Union against the Venereal Peril, the quarter’s hygiene inspector, Dr. Eugene Lépinay, admitted that the medical supervision in Bousbir failed to create the sterile environment he had hoped for, since women were constantly re-infected. An experiment involving free clinics for European prostitutes, moreover, proved to be a failure as well because women withdrew from treatment after symptoms had disappeared and did not complete it until fully cured. His conclusion was that voluntary health measures were inapplicable³³.

30More generally, the conduct of registered Moroccan prostitutes, even their daily and weekly routine, was strictly regulated. They had to avoid raising their voice, singing or making any sounds that would provoke complaints by neighbors or passers-by. Their movements were closely supervised: they were allowed to leave Bousbir only once a week, and only with permission. Any woman who wished to relocate was obliged to inform the authorities, obtain a clean bill of health before relocating to another city, and the approval of the health authorities in her new locale. A woman could have herself stricken off the official record of prostitutes, if she could provide a guarantor, find a respectable employment, return to her family, get married or convince the police that she was too old or too ill for prostitution³⁴.

31In addition to Bousbir’s clinics, dispensaries were open for their clients and these men’s families. In listing the challenges they faced in VD control in North Africa, many doctors referred to the indifference, ignorance, or fatalism of their Muslim patients. They were indifferent to the symptoms, did not use prophylactics, and even when they did go to a doctor, they rarely completed their treatment. “Muslim fatalism” was one explanation most doctors offered for this reluctance to seek treatment or follow it through³⁵.

32Another problem was that Europeans often stopped coming when the clinics were mixed, and particularly European women, who were “repugnant by this imposed contact with the indigenous population.” The director of medical services in Casablanca thus recommended separate dispensaries, which were opened in 1936. In smaller places, the recommendation was to operate separate visit hours³⁶. The dispensary, moreover, segregated Moroccan patients from European, Jewish and Senegalese. This segregation of medical services was framed and rationalized as a respect for Moroccan local mores and customs³⁷.

33In addition to red light districts, mobile brothels were a service provided by the French military to its colonial forces on the move, particularly in the countryside. Whereas soldiers’ wives stayed at home while their men were on the move, in French colonial outposts women were mobilized to follow the troops. In French North Africa the field brothel (bordel militaire de campagne, or BMC) followed French troops in their “pacification” assignments. In a sense, they were both mobile and stationary, as they moved with the troops, but were designed to serve the same clientele. In practice however, in addition to military personnel, transitory populations, such as drivers, nomads and passing troops, frequented the BMCs and brought disease. Soldiers, moreover, preferred the so-called “clandestine prostitutes” from nearby villages. These provided not only a brief sexual encounter, but a “romantic” soirée, which soldiers appreciated. These encounters were not medically supervised and brought disease to the garrisons and into the BMCs. Consequently, medical doctors suggested stricter control: banning outsiders from the BMCs and punishing soldiers who frequented unsupervised prostitutes³⁸.

34These BMCs became the topic of much debate. Medical doctors were highly critical of the BMCs. A military doctor stationed at Ouarzazate, a Berber town in the Moroccan High Atlas, explained that supervision of the BMC provided only illusionary protection. First, soldiers visiting Marrakesh or faraway posts, as well as passing troops, drivers and vendors who followed them, passed their germs to the troops through the BMCs’ women. Second, soldiers preferred the unauthorized village brothels with no medical supervision at all. His suggestion was to impose greater segregation: stricter medical supervision of the BMC, exclusion of non-troops and banning unauthorized brothels³⁹.

35The French abolitionist press also attacked the regulated brothels. First, they were seen as negatively affecting the French military and the reputation of the French Empire in general. Second, the abolitionist press published letters by soldiers and officers stationed overseas who complained that the BMCs were not only sources of contamination, but also caused conflicts among the troops. One of them noted that two thirds of his platoon was debilitated by syphilis. The only disciplinary measure undertaken was to segregate soldiers from other regiments, as well as from indigenous clients. In a manner echoing the British imperialist attitudes mentioned above he concluded that this was not the way to teach “our indigenous subjects” to love and respect France⁴⁰. Although on the whole the French were less concerned with national prestige than the British, similar concerns surfaced: not banning brothels altogether, but rather distancing the French body from the indigenous one.

36Similarly, one officer stationed in Morocco wrote to L’abolitioniste of his experience with the BMCs. Stationed but 10km from the rebellious Rif combatants, a BMC was placed at the middle of the camp, and the officer was ordered to inspect the women for signs of venereal disease. These BMCs, in his view, caused only excitement, jealousy and quarrels among soldiers. Once they were closed down, he concluded, such problems soon disappeared⁴¹.

37To conclude this section, both British and French military authorities were concerned with low-ranking soldiers and their interactions with prostitutes. Following WWI, and during French “pacification”’ efforts in North Africa, men on the move resorted to stationary mobile brothels, regardless of official policies. The question of respectability and prestige also affected policy – what the local population might think of the colonial army was of the utmost importance, although different solutions were devised in each case. In the French colonies and mandated areas, the BMCs represented an interesting interplay between the mobility of soldiers, to be accommodated, the mobility of other nomadic male population, which were the source of contamination, as well as between the mobile brothels designated for the soldiers and the stationary ones they preferred. As we have seen here, this policy was highly controversial, as feminist advocates, as well as soldiers, saw abstinence as preferable for French imperial prestige. As we have seen above, inter-colonial rivalry made some French officials envious of British military abolitionist policies.

Sailors and the ILO

The sailor is an easy guest to entertain […] He does not expect first class performers at the concert, in fact he has kindly fellow feeling for the mediocre amateur, nor is he too critical about the quality of the cricket pitch or the state of the football ground⁴².

38Whereas colonial empires were concerned with the spread of disease among their troops and with controlling the conduct of lower-class men as they reflected on colonial prestige, the ILO (as well as the British and French Empires) was concerned with mobile male labor. This concern was influenced by colonial interest in colonial men, as well as specific, centuries-old concern with soldiers’ conduct. Sailors were a transnational group, a human frontier between the nation-state and the world. They participated in a global labor market that allowed a high degree of freedom across national borders. They were mostly young men, away from wives and families, discharged from ships after weeks of rigorous discipline with accumulated wages they could spend ashore. Drinking and frequenting prostitutes were certainly big on-shore attractions⁴³.

39In the 19th century, it was sailors’ missionaries who tried to contain the perceived damage, mainly moral and national, caused to sailors. The sailors’ missions were a response to the increasing transnational mobility of seafaring labor. German sailors’ missionaries, for example, saw sailors as prodigal sons in constant danger of being seduced away from the fatherland in foreign ports. What the missionaries were trying to create was a homeland abroad, designed to preserve German identity against an increasingly globalized urban context. They relied on German communities overseas to maintain a German sense of community. They offered room and board at reduced rates and were designed to attract sailors away from bars and brothels. The sailor was presented as irresponsible for his own behavior, a victim of seduction⁴⁴. Similarly, and from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, secular sailors’ homes were established to provide room and board for destitute seamen, and were designed, in part, to distance sailors from taverns⁴⁵.

40In colonial contexts, sailors’ conduct was a matter of colonial prestige. In 19th century India, for example, seamen were seen as threatening the ideological substructures of British rule: they were often drunk, frequented prostitutes and exhibited cruel behavior toward the natives. This unruly behavior was threatening because it undermined the ideological premise of imperial rule based on racial difference. Seamen were also stricken by disease, which they spread to the next port of call, undermining British claims of racial superiority of the European body. British reformers often portrayed these sailors as victims of procurers and liquor vendors, or as men who lacked the intelligence and self-discipline to resist temptation. They were often confined to the ship as their interaction with the local population had to be minimized, so that natives would not come to question the master race’s superiority⁴⁶. In the French case, posters in sailors’ quarters warned against venereal disease and the exposure of European sailors to exotic locales was cited as causes of VD infection. Infected sailors were immediately confined for treatment⁴⁷.

41Sailors’ youth, mobility and lack of attachments made them particularly vulnerable to venereal disease, and also ideal disease carriers. As Anyaa Anim-Addo argues, the arrival of steamers to colonial ports became intertwined with port cities’ everyday life. These maritime rhythms folded metropolitan and colonial spaces together, making these colonial ports micro-cosmoses of colonial encounter⁴⁸. In the 19th century, sailors had to pay for treatment out of their own pocket, were not entitled to paid leaves in case of VD, and could be ostracized or even dismissed if infected. In the early years of the 20th century several factors, especially medical advances in diagnosis and treatment, convinced employers and legislators that such policies were counter-productive, because they did not deter men from frequenting prostitutes, but did deter them from seeking treatment. As treatment became more effective than ever before, providing access to treatment was increasingly in the economic interest of governments, employers and sailors alike⁴⁹.

42The ILO was an important player in the attempt to create an international prevention network. As a body representing governments, employers and trade unions, it had the jurisdiction and the motivation to bring new regulation into effect after the war. Indeed, it dedicated some of its conferences in this period to seamen’s welfare issues otherwise not covered by national or international legislation⁵⁰.

43The 1924 Brussels Convention, sponsored by the ILO, was the first international attempt to contain the spread of VD in commercial fleets. It mandated free VD treatment for sailors, and the distribution of an internationally recognized individual health card enabled patients to continue treatment in the next port of call. Propaganda measures were also introduced to inform sailors about prophylaxis, symptoms and treatment venues. Sailors’ “nomadic life”, lack of discipline and the “promiscuity of life on board” made them a particularly vulnerable population: it was virtually impossible to conduct follow-up treatment, as they moved from port to port, and thus spread their germs. A 1926 ILO document explained the motivations and rationale of the convention. Army deployments, the contribution of colonial troops, the influx of refugees, and resettlement efforts had caused the unprecedented spread of syphilis, which obliged international cooperation most urgently in the postwar years⁵¹.

44The ILO prophylactic recommendations, in a 1926 memorandum, included the following: (i) closing down establishments that served alcohol around the port by 10pm; (ii) enforcing the ban on the sale of narcotics; (iii) reducing the number of taverns; (iv) banning the employment of female waitresses in establishments that sell alcohol; (v) severe medical control of women who have illegitimate relations with men; (vi) criminalization of VD infection and adoption of prophylactic measures; (vii) banning peddlers or any other non authorized personnel from boarding ships; and (viii), control over boatmen, who carried sailors to their ship⁵².

45The ILO’s interest in regulating sailors, registering them and supervising their on shore conduct. attests to the anxiety about unruly young men becoming infected. The solution devised and the language framing these debates, however, hint at much more deep-rooted anxieties, about how these men would reflect on national and colonial prestige, and how to minimize not only their exposure to venereal disease, but also their interactions with native societies and their mode of conduct more generally. Prevention strategies are about creating an illusion of immobility through spectacle –creating little metropoles everywhere along the sailor’s route.

46To conclude, the ILO treatment of sailors built on existing practices designed to contain the presumed danger posed by these mobile men. One was colonial –seeing their behavior as a threat to white men’s prestige. The other was missionary –distancing them from temptation. Building on both traditions, the ILO sought to minimize the interphase between sailors and local communities in ports.

Conclusion

47How people move, where, how fast and how often, are discernibly gendered. The meaning given to mobility is gendered, and narratives of mobility and immobility are part of the construction of gender⁵³. Here I have shown how the mobility of young men was problematized and how different authorities attempted to contain it. In the context of a colonial encounter, restrictions and permission of movement were connected to colonial prestige and the ability to maintain an image of colonial self-restraint and fit masculinity. The tension between the mobility of men and the immobility of women (be it wives or prostitutes) was central to these debates. This article followed several sites – ports, BMCs and ex-pat entertainment venues, as nodes of mobility, and the ways in which different authorities tried to monitor the encounters created between prostitutes and patrons, North African and European bodies, soldiers and civilians, humans and germs, humans and alcohol.

48WWI and its immediate aftermath created particular challenges of mass mobilization and demobilization, which French and British authorities handled in different ways. Early 20th century British notions of imperial masculinity mandated self-restraint; and prostitution was widely seen as undermining British claims of racial superiority. Subaltern men’s unruly behavior embarrassed the empire. The solution found was to ban brothel districts to servicemen and sailors and to devise alternative activities for recreation and distraction. Whereas frequenting brothels in groups gave men a sense of male camaraderie and an opportunity to exhibit their masculinity, sport was supposed to provide a proper masculine alternative.

49The French case demonstrates an ambiguity pointed out by Judith Surkis: sexual desire was seen as both natural and dangerous. The case of the BMCs demonstrates the policy of accommodating men’s perceived needs by sending the prostitutes to them, wherever they were. This necessitated efforts to contain the spread of venereal disease through stricter control of prostitutes and by providing more medical supervision to servicemen. The BMCs indeed scandalized French feminists and some officers, but these responses were the exception. Prostitution was a service to be provided to men –especially European men– and the medical establishment was required to make it safer for them, for their wives, and for their offspring. The ILO 1924 convention constituted an attempt to resolve the challenge of men-on-the-move on a global scale.

50The difference between British and French empires was mainly in policies enacted. Both, however, shared similar anxieties regarding racial mixing and imperial prestige; both privileged the presumed needs of men away from home over the wellbeing of prostitutes. Sailors in the interwar years carried similar assumptions to the international realm –the need to contain lower-class men and their interactions with local populations.