Anti-Christ in Egypt: Sexual Danger, Race, and Crime in a Narrative of Imperial Crisis

European women active as sex workers in the empire became a dense referent for the articulation of an increasingly unstable imperial self. In this article I focus on discourses of gendered crime as an index of mounting colonial anxieties in a specific imperial setting, colonial Egypt, to investigate how the global moral panic known as “white slavery” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries exposed a very peculiar tension in the nexus between notions of womanhood and agency at the core of the social understanding of prostitution; how this mapped onto the colonial space—in fact, how the definition of issues of women’s autonomy and agency became particularly salient in the colonial context as civilizational marker; and how it was dramatically reconfigured in times of imperial crisis.