This chapter provides a thematic overview of commercial sex across time and space. Each section seeks to identify continuities and shifts in the way people debated, policed, and practiced commercial sex. While the analysis focuses primarily on the modern period, the chapter starts in antiquity to discuss the gendered and hierarchical notions that different societies and groups have used to refer to the ‘flesh trade’. A second section deals with the regimes and actors that have sought to control, repress, regulate, or decriminalise/normalise the sale of sex at the local, national, and international levels. Where possible, the voices of women and men who traded physical sex for money or other benefits are included in the analysis. The bottom-up approach is further developed in sections three and four, which focus on the structure and working conditions of the sex trade and profile the sellers of sex, intermediaries, and clients. A concluding section reflects on stigma, an issue that seems to have remained constant in the long history of (female) prostitution, and on coercion and consent, concepts that can be regarded as typically modern.

The essay surveys a broad selection of literary responses to tourism, which plays a significant role in the Caribbean. While the tourism economy is not inconsequential, the authors in focus tend to portray the commercialization and commodification of the archipelago, often marketed through the fantasy of paradise islands, in a negative light. Targeting the ‘leisure imperialism’ of tourism ideology, they trace an unsettling legacy in which the violent past of sugar and slavery survives in the smiling servitude of industrialized tourism. The superficial discourse of love and peace, the hedonism imposed on the sunny tropics, the supposedly willing sycophancy of the locals eager to please wealthy tourists are all dismantled through humour and dark satire to reveal a bleak underside of drugs, sex, exploitation, antipathy and social rot. However, calls for responsible, ‘slow’ tourism more beneficial to the locals hope that the industry may be ethically operated.