Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires

(Hardback)

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Description

Licentious Worlds is a history of sexual attitudes and behaviour through five hundred years of empire-building around the world. In a graphic and sometimes unsettling account, Julie Peakman examines colonisation and the imperial experience putting women back in the picture, showing their role in the building of empires, but also how marginalised men and women were almost invariably exploited.

Women acted as negotiators, brothel-keepers, traders and peacekeepers, but they were also oppressed, forced into marriages and raped. The book describes daily life in Turkish harems, Mughal zenanas and Japanese geisha houses, as well as in royal palaces, private households and on board ships. The stories are drawn from many sources from captains' logs, missionary reports and cannibals' memoirs to travellers' letters, traders' accounts and reports on prostitution. From debauched clerics and hog-sodomising Pilgrims to sexually fluid cannibals and homosexual samurai, Licentious Worlds takes history where it has never been before.

Reviews

"As erudite as it is entertaining, Peakman's Licentious Worlds persuasively and meticulously reveals the centrality of gender systems and the control of sexuality across a wide range of empires and times."--Philippa Levine, University of Texas at Austin
"Licentious Worlds offers an alternative history by putting the real lives of women (and crucially, marginalized men) back in the picture. Using illustrative stories from a wide range of sources, Peakman vividly explores the social and cultural impact of male empire-building. . . . A richly illustrated, persuasive and absorbing book that will appeal to the specialist scholar and the general reader. It is uncompromising in its desire to provide a balanced and historically accurate record of sex, exploitation, and empire."-- "Women's History Review"
"Peakman consulted hundreds of primary sources, including legal reports and erotica, and visited archives all over the world. Her encyclopedia of imperial sex has a formula that is repetitive but effective. . . . This book amounts to more than Carry on up the Empire meets Fifty Shades of Grey. It has a serious message: at the heart of all empire-building is a form of sex culture that varies according to time, place, and people's experience of it." -- "Times Higher Education"
"Peakman's Licentious Worlds, about women and the many roles they played in furthering Western imperialism, is a fascinating read. She looks at the experiences of Western women, whose records are not easy to locate, as well as non-Western women who lived in conquered territories, whose records are largely non-existent. Splitting the narrative by place and time, from efforts to settle in North America in the early seventeenth century to Japan's forcible opening in the later part of the nineteenth century, Peakman has made excellent use of her sources, employing them to illustrate the different ways in which sexual attitudes and male-female relationships changed, not necessarily for the better, in areas that were taken over by Europeans and Americans. As a lovely bonus, the hardback version is lavishly illustrated with paintings and drawings, many reproduced in color. This book is an absolute pleasure to read. Highly recommended."-- "Choice"

Author Bio

Julie Peakman is a historian, author and broadcaster renowned for her work on the history of sexuality. She is author of many books including The Pleasures All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (Reaktion, 2013), Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore (2015) and Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in 18th Century Sexual Cultures (2016). She lives in London.