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Philippa Hetherington (Sydney) 

Between 1880 and 1917, over two million Russian subjects emigrated across the empire's western borders, most clandestinely as a result of the Tsarist state's de jure criminalization of emigration.

This talk will examine how the imperial state confronted the reality of ‘illegal’ emigration in part through engagement with the emerging international language of trafficking, in particular trafficking in women for the purposes of prostitution (torgovliia zhenshchinami).  Focusing on the Black Sea region, which was frequently conceptualised as a space of porous borders and nefarious traffickers, I will ldiscuss the ways in which fears of an apparent trade in women between Russian and Ottoman empires were mobilised to support the greater securitisation and surveillance of the border, and of the empire’s mobile subjects, more generally.