Book description
At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps and 'white
slavers' established a hugely successful global market for commercial
sex and for three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph
Silver was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust
and sexual slavery.
Burglar, gun-runner and trafficker in women on four continents,
Silver was a disturbed adolescent, youthful predator and adult
misogynist whose notoriety was captured in the most confidential
correspondence of a dozen countries in the western world. But what
those in charge of law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves was how
their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to
infiltrate syndicates, only to have him outwit them as he moved in the
dangerous space between police and prostitutes.
In this brilliant study, Charles van Onselen situates the private
life of one man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world and casts
a brilliant light on the most infamous serial killer of all time -
Jack the Ripper.
Charles van Onselen is an acclaimed biographer who has been honoured
with visiting fellowships at Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. A graduate of
Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and St. Antony's College, Oxford, his
earlier works on the social history of southern Africa won him, amongst
others, the American African Studies Association's Herskovits Prize, the
Institute of Commonwealth Studies' Trevor Reese Memorial Prize and the
Sunday Times
Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. He has published extensively in
leading historical journals in America, England and France. A Fellow of
the Royal Society (S. A.) he has recently been a visiting fellow at
Magdalen College, Oxford, and the recipient of an honorary doctorate in
literature from Rhodes University. He is currently Research Professor in
the Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Pretoria in South
Africa.
