The cover of Siobhán Hearne's book, Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia, is striking. It features rows of headshots of registered prostitutes from the early 1900s. These photographs are visual emblems of the regulation of prostitution; they served to identify women who sold sex and registered with the tsarist police. Hearne's excellent social history is a rich examination of the history of this system of regulation, specifically, how it “was implemented, experienced, and resisted” (7) on the ground during the last two decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. This was a period marked by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and migration—and the resulting expansion of prostitution and its regulation.

The regulation of prostitution was not unique to Russia. It was implemented throughout the nineteenth century in places such as the Habsburg Monarchy, the French Empire, and Argentina. The purpose of the system was not to criminalize prostitution, but rather subject it to rules and regulations in the name of public health. With rising rates of venereal disease, prostitutes were required to register with the police, undergo regular medical examinations, and refrain from conspicuous behavior. In Russia, regulation was introduced in the 1840s, and solidified between the 1880s and 1910s, thereby “cement[ing] ‘prostitute’ as a legal and occupational identity” (5). (For this reason and to avoid anachronism, Hearne refers to “prostitutes” instead of “sex workers,” despite the latter term's associations with worker agency.) What makes the Russian case especially significant was the chasm that existed between regulation in theory versus regulation in practice. Drawing on exhaustive archival research, Hearne's study focuses on the northwestern portion of the former Russian Empire (present-day Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Arkhangel'sk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg) to highlight the limits of the empire-wide policy. On the peripheries of empire, regulation was shaped by regional authorities and local concerns, rendering the system weak and ineffective.

The Imperial Russian case is significant for another reason: its unique source base. A longstanding tradition of public supplication during imperial rule has resulted in an extensive collection of petitions written by ordinary people, including prostitutes, to tsarist authorities. Hearne uses these petitions to recover past voices, as well as to examine how ordinary people experienced and resisted regulation. In so doing, she reveals that petitions concerning prostitution were not only written by prostitutes, but also by a range of different actors.

To be sure, Hearne's central argument is that the regulation of prostitution affected more than just prostitutes, but also groups of other actors, including the men who paid for sex, brothel madams and landlords, police patrolmen, and urban residents. Each one of the book's five chapters focuses on one of these groups, its experience of and resistance to regulation, as well as its interaction with the tsarist state. Hearne ultimately shows that regulation “was not just about commercial sex. Instead, the system was another tool in the tsarist state's arsenal for monitoring the behaviour and bodies of lower-class people” (182), as well as lower-class sexuality. While the objects of state regulation were, first and foremost, prostitutes, a closer look at the book's cover—headshots of modestly dressed, mostly hatless women—reveals something else: they were lower-class. The regulation of prostitution was the regulation of lower-class people, more generally, rooted in the paternalism of empire.

These were not passive victims of state policy, however. Not only was the system of regulation ineffective, Hearne argues, those people it affected both challenged and manipulated policies to their own ends, asserting their agency. Prostitutes, for example, used practices intended to limit their movement to their own advantage, so that they were often afforded greater mobility than other migrants. Brothel madams, meanwhile, bribed police patrolmen to turn a blind eye to illegal activities, while many policemen were themselves consumers of commercial sex. Men paying for sex further denied their own culpability in the spread of venereal disease, while landlords rented apartments to prostitutes for their own financial gain. But agency does not mean unlimited freedom either. Hearne stresses that many of these actions were not done out of pure choice, but from a place of calculation and necessity.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this fascinating book is the centrality of class in the history of prostitution. By equating the policing of prostitution with the regulation of the lower classes, Hearne shifts the focus away from gender, which is often a central category structuring many histories of prostitution. At a few points, however, I did wonder if this emphasis on class was somewhat overstated, and whether a more intersectional approach would have been warranted. Is it fair to equate the policing of prostitutes’ bodies with those of male sailors, for example, even if both groups are lower-class? And in apprehending women suspected of unregistered prostitution, did police only consider signs of “lower-class female behavior” (49) rather than deviant femininity, more generally? These minor quibbles aside, Policing Prostitution is an original work of scholarship that offers a new way of understanding the “oldest profession.”