This ambitious book attempts to map out a materialist theory of the global political economy of sex. It looks at one neglected aspect of the reproductive economy—the role played by migrant women in the provision of domestic and sexual labor—what Anna Agathangelou calls the “global political economy of desire.” She uses as her case studies three “peripheral economies” in the Eastern Mediterranean: Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey. She examines the roles played by two different groups of women in the construction of these processes. She looks first at the “white but not quite” women from East Central Europe and the ex-Soviet Union who have often been trafficked and now work as hostesses, prostitutes, and other kinds of sex workers in bars, clubs, and casinos. She also examines the roles of “black” women workers who come, for example, from the Philippines and Sri Lanka. It is these women who predominate among domestic servants and who often work long hours under appalling conditions to service the demands of their employers. Agathangelou therefore explores the workings of the racialized hierarchies within these groups of workers in terms of the ways in which they are seen by the local population and the discourses employed to describe them.

The author undertakes this study using detailed empirical research. She has conducted extensive interviews with different groups of women—both employees and employers—as well as a number of men, particularly the “impressarios” who often control the sex workers. She also held large numbers of focus groups with different groups of women. Through these methods, she supplies us with a detailed picture of different women's lives and the varying conditions under which they work and are exploited, thereby providing us with many valuable insights into this much underresearched area of study.

The book seeks to be both theoretically sophisticated and to make a significant contribution to the debates about gender and political economy. The underlying framework is one informed by the latest work on feminist international relations and international political economy (IPE). For example, the author uses Spike Peterson's attempt to integrate the productive and reproductive economies, and also draws extensively on postcolonial and Marxist scholarship. Agathangelou argues for the use of an alternative ontology to those that are common in the mainstream of IR—one that uses a Marxist feminist historical-materialist method. She ends by outlining some of the different transformative practices that some of the women have engaged in, as well as describing some of the nascent organizing that is emerging. She therefore wants her work also to contribute to the creation of “dialectical linkages between praxis and theory” (p. 175).

The author has made a good start on the very ambitious tasks that she has set herself, but it perhaps appears that this is too big an undertaking to be conducted in one book-length study, and as a result there is some overgeneralization. For example, it is debatable whether the category of peripheral economy can be meaningful for both Greece—which has been a member of the European Union for some time—and Turkey, which despite its aspirations to join will not gain entry anytime soon. A more narrowly focused analysis might have provided us with more nuanced theoretical insights. But overall, this book is a useful addition to the literature on the gendered global political economy of migration, work, and the reproductive economy by filling some important gaps in our knowledge of this hitherto rather neglected area.