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Since at least the fourteenth century, the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula was a vital artery of trade for merchants in Southeast Asia, which connected the eastern and western hemispheres. Stopping between the silver mines in Latin America and the spice and luxury markets in Asia, Spanish and Portuguese merchants traded with local chiefs for women in ports throughout the Philippines and along the Malayan coast to solidify business relationships in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
However, these relationships were eroded by emerging ideas of nationalism and racial degeneration. By the nineteenth century, individual entrepreneurs, businessmen, and women from around the region capitalized on the growing demand for domestic and sexual services from increasing populations of migrant male labourers and began to import women and girls to supply a growing commercial trade for colonial centres throughout Southeast Asia.
However, Singapore was already a key centre for what was a sophisticated, intricately organized, and highly prosperous underground network, and colonial officials struggled unsuccessfully to curb it. In the past two centuries, colonization, war, and unprecedented economic growth drove waves of unattached male labourers, soldiers, seamen, and businessmen to take up temporary residence in Singapore.
