"The White Devil’s Daughters: The Fight Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown" is ostensibly about the missionaries who ran a rescue house on Sacramento Street. However, its true nature exposes how the city manufactured a human trafficking economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how an alliance of women courageously fought against it. With the book's early introduction of Donaldina “Dolly” Cameron, a white Presbyterian missionary, I braced myself for the familiar white-savior narrative. However, Julia Flynn Siler remains true to the nuance of how white benevolence materialized into tangible aid for thousands of trafficked Chinese girls.

The historical conditions Siler documents are best understood as the product of overlapping and mutually reinforcing systems of imperial capitalism. California’s early economy recruited Chinese men as a source of cheap, disposable labor - first for the Gold Rush, then the Transcontinental Railroad - yet segregated them to the confines of a few blocks. Combined with anti-miscegenation laws and immigration policies, this produced a gender imbalance of ten men to one woman. This scarcity was strategically designed to extract labor from Chinese men while denying them the conditions of family and community available to white settlers.

Thus catalyzed the mechanisms for human trafficking - Chinese girls sold by indebted families under the mui tsai system or abducted for profit and shipped across the Pacific. Early iterations of what would formally become the San Francisco Police Department unsurprisingly participated in this cycle, holding the girls at docks like inventory until buyers arrived. Unfortunately, the unsurprising abuse and exploitation of sex slavery ensued - these Chinese girls being the catalyst of violent disputes among rival Tong factions; sold to Australian immigrant gang members and traveling New England elites - all eager to experience an "oriental" for the first time; and served to officials as bribes to keep brothels operating. Siler illustrates these appalling stories via meticulously sourced photographs, court records, newspaper archives, and personal diaries of those who escaped enslavement.

Gender operated here in a specifically racialized register. The girls subjected to sexual violence by white and Chinese clients alike were excluded from the protections nominally available to white women, yet simultaneously scapegoated by racist residents who cited prostitution as evidence of Chinese moral degeneracy. Indentured status and debt bondage rendered these girls legally and economically disadvantaged - often treated as criminals by law enforcement and the courts.

It is against this dark reality that Siler sets the significant alliance between white missionaries and Chinese escapees. The Mission House provided food and shelter, offered basic education and skill-building, and advocated within a legal system hostile to non-white folks. This solidarity functioned within (and was partly enabled by) the very racial hierarchy it worked against - with white missionaries wielding legal and social legitimacy denied to their Chinese collaborators. Their use of white privilege is worth admiring, without losing sight of why it was necessary in the first place.

Most importantly, Siler is careful to not cast the missionaries as the sole agents of this resistance. The network of Chinese girls grew from within, as those who had already been rescued provided comfort and reassurance to newly arrived girls. The honesty and vulnerability of recounting their own experiences established the necessary trust to form bonds and strengthen the house's mission. These women would also serve as translators, countering propaganda within the Chinese community and verifying testimony in court. What I appreciate most is how much recognition the book gives to the Chinese girls as vital strategists and eventual leaders of the house and broader anti-slavery movement. These girls took agency over their own lives and fiercely protected one another.

This book is not only an in-depth local history, but also an example of how resistance is built within the institutions and systems it opposes. Siler honors the girls and women - missionaries and survivors alike - and, in doing so, we are reminded of the power of intersectional solidarity and revolutionary hope.

Scanlan delivers a comprehensive history and critical analysis of the Great Famine (1845-1852), a direct consequence of British imperialism and globalization. Deconstructing the xenophobic myth of Irish "backwardness" (the notion that famine resulted from the Irish people's moral failure to embrace modernity), he offers an impressive yet unsettling argument that the famine was not a failure to modernize but an inevitable result of it - an early blueprint and foreshadowing of present-day capitalism. This book is rich with economic policy and theory, reflecting the depth of Scanlan's research - highly recommend for those drawn to more scholarly prose.