Matthew H. Kramer's "Rights and Right-Holding"

Matthew H. Kramer is Professor of Legal & Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the Director of the Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy, and he has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2014. His work covers numerous areas of political, moral, and legal philosophy.

Kramer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my 2024 book Rights and Right-Holding is the opening page of the book’s third chapter. Given that the page tersely summarizes some of the main lines of thought from the preceding chapter while also outlining the chief aims of Chapter 3, a sciolist who wants to appear to be acquainted with the content of the book without actually reading it could do worse than to turn to page 99. Still, the book was not written for sciolists, and anyone who peruses page 99 in isolation might feel somewhat at sea. For example, such a person will encounter the phrase “disjunctive universal quantification.” If he or she is already familiar with the terminology of formal logic, then the phrase just mentioned will be understandable. Otherwise, however, that phrase may seem formidably opaque to anyone who has not taken the time to read Chapter 2 before moving on to the opening page of Chapter 3.

In five chapters that span 400 pages, Rights and Right-Holding presents a systematic philosophical exposition of the nature of rights and the nature of right-holding. Page 99 of the book occurs approximately halfway through the exposition of rights. For some readers, the issues addressed in the book that will be of greatest interest are those which pertain to the holding of claim-rights (and of other entitlements such as liberties, powers, and immunities). Such readers might, for example, be particularly interested in questions about the holding of claim-rights by non-human animals or by future generations of people or by dead people. Those issues, and numerous other matters pertaining to the holding of claim-rights or other entitlements, are nowhere in evidence on page 99. Thus, anyone who starts and finishes with page 99 will get a highly distortive and impoverished sense of why I have written Rights and Right-Holding.

Learn more about Rights and Right-Holding at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Light's "The White Ladder"

Daniel Light has been climbing for twenty years indoors and out. He lives in London, UK.

Light applied the "Page 99 Test" to The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering, his first book, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The White Ladder thrusts us, mid-sentence, into the precipitate retreat of William Woodman Graham, the first European alpinist to climb in High Asia.

Graham is soon licking his wounds back in Darjeeling, where he makes plans to return to the mountains, his mind set on one particular massif in the Garhwal Himalaya:

Nanda Devi, ‘the Bliss-Giving Goddess’, is a mountain steeped in Indian folklore, said to be the last refuge of a beautiful princess who dared to rebuff the advances of a Rohilla prince. The young man did not take rejection well and waged war against her father, the king, defeating him on the battlefield. With no alternative but to run and hide, the princess, Nanda, fled to the highest reaches of the mountain, retreating into the rock itself. Thus, she became the mountain, its Devi, or patron-goddess, and it her eternal sanctuary.

And what a sanctuary. The mountain ‘rises from the centre of two concentric amphitheatres, resembling two horseshoes placed one within the other and touching each other at the toe,’ wrote the English mountaineer Dr Tom Longstaff. ‘The outer amphitheatre, or horseshoe, measures seventy miles in circumference and from its crest rise a dozen peaks of over 20,000 feet, including Trisul and Dunagiri as well as Nanda Devi East.’

Graham arrived in the vicinity of Nanda Devi in July...

William Graham is a pivotal figure within the book, a sportsman who courted controversy by going to the Himalaya 'for no higher purpose' than to climb at a time when, where the British were concerned, the mountains were the preserve of scientists and surveyors.

At this critical moment, when he might easily have lost heart, we find him resolutely determined - one of few characteristics common to the cast of eccentrics who pioneered high-altitude mountaineering on the greater ranges of the world.

Page 99 features another of the book's unsung heroes - the mountain, Nanda Devi. Today the Western world fixates on Mount Everest, so much so that, for a few days each summer, queues form at the summit. Such is 'the pull of the absolute'. In The White Ladder, I have tried to shine a light on some of the other peaks and mountain massifs that shouldered the upward advance of mountaineering's world altitude record, and to tell stories of their own. With its mix of fable and the physical, page 99 attests to the challenge of conjuring dream-like scenes amidst a landscape that must remain clear and comprehensible.

Graham exits page 99 as abruptly as he arrived, as he and his guide and porter advance towards the mountain along 'the course of dramatic river-cut gorge, the Rishi Ganga'. So ends his tidy cameo, in a book that finds one pioneering figure after another testing themself against some of the highest mountains on Earth. Graham, one of the more human - and humanitarian - is a better representative than some of them deserve.

Visit Daniel Light's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren E. Oakes's "Treekeepers"

Lauren E. Oakes is a conservation scientist and science writer. She has held various appointments at Stanford University over many years, as a researcher, a lecturer, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science. Author of In Search of the Canary Tree, she lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Oakes applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…data revealed that Aboriginal people were responsible for moving around Castanospermum australe, a flowering tree native to the eastern coast [of Australia]. After a careful treatment that removed toxins, the seeds of these “bean trees” could yield a ground meal for food. “Dreaming stories” of tracks were passed across generations to maintain knowledge of physical pathways that Aboriginal people had traversed. The researchers who discovered the species’ dispersal followed these physical pathways inland from the coast to the western ranges. The routes that had been shared through song and story revealed the intentional movement of trees along ridgelines to the various inland groves. Back then, people weren’t moving them to help the trees survive. They were moving those trees to grow them where they needed them most.

Strange as it seems, changing planting strategies because of climate change may be a modern-day extension of what people have been doing for quite some time.

It seems fitting to discover an historical example of people moving species around intentionally by page 99 of Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future. This excerpt might lead the reader to think the book is about the ways Indigenous communities have shaped and stewarded forests. Yet, the dispersal of bean trees along ancestral pathways serves as a brief example of how people have been transporting seed and planting species far from their original sources for millennia. As people now face hotter and drier climate conditions in many places across the world, planting trees ‘out front’ of climate change could help those trees endure future conditions.

In recent years, planting a tree has become a catchall way to ‘do something good for the planet.’ Despite the negativity and sense of doom-and-gloom surrounding climate change, outlets across the political spectrum have purported the same potential solution: planting trees. But to what extent can trees really save us, and how?

Treekeepers offers a critical look at how forests contribute to the fight against climate change, revealing the complex roles they can play in making the planet more habitable for life into the future. By page 99 of the story, it’s evident that a new movement to increase forest cover around the world is underway and that keeping trees is far more complicated than just planting them. But if you’re going to plant, considering what populations and species are more likely to cope with the future climate is one piece of the puzzle.

Our ‘treekeepers’ today include people caring for trees in remote forests and cities, in governments, organizations, companies and local communities. Without spoiling too much, the story leaves readers feeling like anyone can contribute, and there are also some ways we can collectively do this work better.

Visit Lauren E. Oakes's website.

The Page 99 Test: In Search of the Canary Tree.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerald Roche's "The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet"

Gerald Roche is an anthropologist, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, and a Co-Chair of the Global Coalition of Language Rights. His work focuses on power, the state, colonialism, and racism.

Roche applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, tells the story of Lhamo, a Tibetan woman born on the northeast Tibetan Plateau in 1993. Lhamo doesn’t actually exist. Her story is a fictional ethnographic composite, based on autobiographical interviews I did with dozens of people, designed to dramatize the profound changes that took place in the everyday life of the third generation of Tibetans to live under Chinese rule. Lhamo’s story describes her schooling, her struggle to find employment, her relationships with her family, and significant historical events and trends that formed the backdrop of her life.

Browsers opening The Politics of Language Oppression to page 99 would probably not get a very good overall idea about my book. Although Lhamo’s story deals with many of the key issues that the book explores, readers would miss most of the context they need to understand how her story encapsulates those issues. Three significant issues that appear on page 99, but which might not make much sense to readers, are the local ethnographic context, Chinese state policy towards Tibetan languages, and the Tibetan movement to resist those policies.

The local ethnographic context where Lhamo lives is the valley of Rebgong, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau, in what is today the province of Qinghai. Rebgong is predominantly Tibetan, and although Lhamo is Tibetan, her preferred language is not Tibetan, but a language called Manegacha. Manegacha is one of about 30 minority languages spoken today by Tibetans in China.

State policy completely ignores these languages, and we see this in Lhamo’s story. Lhamo studies in a school where Tibetan dominates, but she also has to learn China’s national language, Mandarin. She has no opportunities to pursue meaningful life opportunities through her own language.

Lhamo lives through moments of Tibetan resistance to such policies: the protests of 2008—the most widespread protests against Chinese rule in Tibet—2010 street demonstrations in Rebgong, and a series of self-immolation protests in 2012. However, all these protests focus only on a single, dominant Tibetan language, not minority languages like Manegacha. Lhamo’s story shows us that all she can expect from other Tibetans is discrimination in the form of taunts and jokes, rather than political support for her marginalized language.

So, although page 99 tells us a lot about Lhamo’s life, and about language oppression in Tibet more generally, readers could be forgiven for missing the significance of these details without some of the broader context.

Learn more about The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Ashcroft's "Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought"

Caroline Ashcroft is Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. She works in twentieth century political theory and history of political thought, particularly German and Anglo-American. She has previously published widely on Arendt’s political ideas, including Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (2021).

Ashcroft applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes towards the beginning of the book's chapter on technologies of destruction; the way in which the political theorists that this book focusses on saw the technologies of modern war as embodying the essential destructiveness of contemporary technology itself. On page 99, I observe how the destructive capacity of modern warfare is linked by these thinkers to the inherently destructive tendencies of modern technology: "the ‘total’ character of modern technologies of war makes irrational the act of war itself; the scope of environmental degradation and catastrophe goes beyond anything earlier technologies might have been responsible for; and while wars have inevitably stoked and utilised the aggression of its soldiers, the extent of technology’s drive to aggression reaches into every corner of peacetime society." This is exemplified by the atom bomb, but even this is viewed as a somewhat inevitable development in the inexorable march of technological advancement.

Page 99 gets to the heart of Catastrophic Technology. The book analyses the critique of technology offered by a number of influential political theorists in the post WWII and Cold War era, including Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno, and their claims that technology is catastrophically reshaping contemporary politics and society, and opening humanity up to unacceptable risks. Many of the thinkers whose work I explore were Jewish exiles from Germany, one (Jacques Ellul) was a member of the French Resistance, many (Lewis Mumford, Hans Jonas) lost parents or children in the fighting or the death camps. In different ways, their lives were shattered and reshaped by the experience of German totalitarianism and total war. Their view of politics - and the influence of technology on politics - was through the lens of these experiences. They came to see, I argue, an inherent relationship between totalitarianism and modern technology as such; the increasing destructive power of technology, its inescapable progression, they argued, led with some inevitability to deeply pernicious political outcomes.

But the fact that these theorists associate technology itself with totalitarian politics also meant their understanding of totalitarianism, and its threat to the modern world, took on a particular political hue. In the Western world, during the early Cold War era, a self-understanding of liberal democratic freedom as something that stood in opposition to the threat of totalitarianism (then identified with the communist East) became a central component of Western political identity: the West stood for freedom, against totalitarianism. The critics of technology challenged this. Although they occupied diverse political positions, from left to right, they agreed - challenging the predominant ideological claims of the period - that liberal states also exhibited at least some of the totalitarian tendencies of technological modernity. What characterised modernity, in the East and the West, was its technological character, they claimed. Liberal political states should not be too self-congratulatory, they suggested, but rather must be aware of the dangers inherent in their increasingly technologized politics and society. One of the problems of liberal politics identified here was the failure of liberalism to identify this threat. Another was the emphasis by liberal ideology on 'progressive' politics and an enduring faith in progress itself - now, frequently identified with technological progress. Liberalism was thus structurally favourable to the continuing advancement of technology, with all its flaws, threats and risk to freedom.

Learn more about Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought at the Edinburgh University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shane Bobrycki's "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages"

Shane Bobrycki is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, and reported the following:

The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages is about people holding onto something lost. It asks what happens to collective behavior — crowds, protests, riots, gatherings, assemblies — in an age of demographic decline (the ancient/medieval transition). Europe in the period c. 500–1000 CE was thinly populated, but deeply engaged with the more populous Roman past, in which crowds were a regular part of life. So the book is all about the ways early medieval Europeans did or didn’t hold onto crowds as they existed in the days of gladiators and circuses. Page 99 turns out to be pretty representative. It discusses churches as a venue for gatherings.

Churches were special spaces in early medieval Europe. Not only were they imbued with religious significance in a largely Christian world, they were bigger and more solidly built than most buildings (homes, work spaces, granaries, etc.). They had their own distinctive feel, light, smell, and look. Their interiors were divided up by means of columns, curtains, chancels, and other separating structures. So human bodies could be organized hierarchically in them: men here, women there; the poor here, elites there; lay people here, clerics there. Such divvied-up spaces fostered a sense of grandeur: in small spaces, fewer people feel more numerous.

Page 99 also gives the counter-example of churches in Rome. Once the greatest metropolis of the ancient world, Rome had shrunk from around 1,000,000 inhabitants (first or second century CE) to perhaps 500,000 inhabitants (fifth century CE) to only around 30,000 inhabitants for most of the period discussed by the book. Whereas the old entertainment facilities (Colosseum, Circus Maximus) tended to be cannibalized for parts or reused (as with the Colosseum) for housing, the huge churches of the fifth century retained their function. Here the effect was different: “Small crowds in huge spaces can experience effects no less profound than large crowds in small ones.”

So the Page 99 Test works pretty well. This page expresses an important argument of the book, which is that crowds did not disappear in the early medieval world, but did change in form and function. One reflection of this is that the crowd served the interests of the powerful more often than of the powerless. The church crowd is a quintessential example of this “early medieval crowd regime.” As for (rare) peasant rebellions and (frequent) non-elite refusals to participate in elite gatherings, you’d have to crack open different pages!

Learn more aboutThe Crowd in the Early Middle Ages at Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane E. Calvert's "Penman of the Founding"

Jane E. Calvert received her PhD in history from the University of Chicago. She has taught at St. Mary's College of Maryland, the University of Kentucky, and Yale University and is currently director and chief editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project. Her work, which has been supported by leading research institutions as well as federal agencies, focuses on the intersection of theology and political theory in the Colonial and Founding Eras. Her first book, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson (2009), describes the origins of civil disobedience in Quakerism and provides the first explanation of Dickinson's thought and action during the Revolution.

Calvert applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Penman of the Founding, 26-year-old John Dickinson, a newly minted barrister, is nearing the end of his representation of William Smith, an Anglican minister, in his trial for libel against the Pennsylvania Assembly by the Pennsylvania Assembly. It’s a sham trial with a foreordained guilty verdict, but Dickinson persisted through interruptions, misrepresentations, censures, and threats against him by the assemblymen to speak truth to power and argue for liberty of the press. Here is a key quote:

“The Freedom of the Press is truly inestimable,” he effused. “It is the Preserver of every other Freedom & the Antidote to every kind of Slavery. By the Assistance of the Press, the Language of Liberty flies like Lightning thro the Land, and when the least attack is made upon her Rights, spreads the Alarm to all her Sons & raises and rouses a Whole people in her Cause.” His conclusion was this: “Freedom of the Press is so opposite & dreadful to the Usurpers of unjust Power & the Enemies of Mankind, that Liberty however maimd & wounded still breathes & struggles, while that prevails.”

The page ends with the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania stepping in to defend Dickinson against the Speaker of the Assembly (who, years later, would become his father-in-law).

Page 99 is a surprisingly good test for giving readers a sense of the book. It shows Dickinson putting into practice what he vowed to do when he was studying in London to become a barrister and what he tried to do his entire life as a lawyer, a statesman, and a private citizen—to “defend the innocent and the injured” and, if necessary, to become a martyr for the cause of justice. Dickinson went on to defend the lowliest of criminals who might not otherwise have had a champion, such as the mixed-race servant woman accused of killing her infant and concealing the body. He taught Americans how to defend their own rights against an oppressive British government, both with peaceful means and with military force. He served in more public offices than any other American Founder and wrote more documents to codify and protect rights. Liberty of the press was just the beginning. He wrote legislation to protect free Black people in what is now Delaware, and he was the only major leader to free all of the Black people he enslaved and write abolition legislation. He tried to protect Americans’ religious liberty, including women’s rights to worship freely and speak publicly. He founded schools for poor children to protect them from ignorance. He proposed the solution for representation in the US Constitutional Convention to protect small states from the large ones and the American union from disunion. He founded the first prison reform society to protect prisoners from inhumane conditions. And he did all of these things and more at sometimes great personal cost to himself, his health, and his family. Thus, page 99 shows the reader exactly the kind of selfless leader Dickinson always was.

Visit Jane E. Calvert's website and The John Dickinson Writings Project.

--Marshal Zeringue

Volha Charnysh's "Uprooted"

Volha Charnysh is a Ford Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Uprooted discusses associational life in West German communities that received Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after WWII. Simply put, associational networks did not cross group boundaries. The locals found numerous ways to exclude expellees from their associations, including rules based on duration of residency, property ownership, and religious affiliation. For example, a local rifle association in Westphalia only accepted Catholics and stipulated that its chairman be a long-time resident. Page 99 illustrates the effect this had on the expellees:

Expellees dealt with exclusion not only by retreating into the private sphere but also by founding their own associations and interest groups […] A survey conducted in the early 1950s indicates that 20 percent of expellees participated in clubs alongside natives; 40 percent were active in expellee organizations; and the remaining 40 percent were entirely isolated (Wurzbacher 1954, 146).

Page 99 successfully conveys the first part of my book’s argument: rearranging ethnically homogeneous populations in space creates new cleavages based on migration status and region of origin. Germans who did not experience uprooting resented having to accommodate their expelled compatriots. They closed their ranks to defend access to jobs and housing. Expellees likewise stuck together, organizing around their shared experience of forced migration and economic hardship.

Unfortunately, readers who stop at page 99 would miss out on the book’s central message: Forced migration negatively impacts societal cohesion in the short term but ultimately creates opportunities to build stronger states and more prosperous economies. By engendering new societal divisions and eroding cooperation needed for public goods provision, the arrival of forced migrants also creates a window of opportunity for strengthening the state. Uprooted heterogeneous societies have more to gain from the state’s presence and are also less able to resist the expansion of state authority. As governments invest more resources into these communities, they build greater institutional capacity. This enhanced state capacity, combined with the skills migrants bring from their diverse places of origin, can improve economic performance in the long run.

My book draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence from Poland – whose borders were moved 200 km west in 1945, uprooting millions of Poles and Germans – and West Germany – which received German expellees from Poland and other countries. Within-country analysis maximizes internal validity, while cross-country comparisons support the generalizability of my conclusions.

I do hope page 99 inspires readers to delve deeper into Uprooted!

Visit Volha Charnysh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James M. Brophy's "Print Markets and Political Dissent"

James M. Brophy specializes in modern European history, particularly the social and political history of nineteenth-century Germany. He received his B.A. from Vassar College, did graduate training at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and took his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He has written Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850 (2007) and Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1830-1870 (1998). He has co-edited Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (2023) as well as Perspectives from the Past: Sources in Western Civilization (1998; 7th ed., 2020). In addition, he published over three dozen essays on modern European history. He is the former president of the Central European History Society and currently sits on the board of editors for the Journal of Modern History.

Brophy applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870, and reported the following:

Page 99 is indeed an instructive page for readers. To understand how forbidden political literature circulated in Germany and Austria, the book follows three hundred publishers who created print markets that advocated constitutionalism and rights-bearing citizenship. How publishers printed and sold banned literature between Napoleon and German unification was no easy matter. Censorship and surveillance were watchwords of the political order under Prussia and Austria. The underground book trade therefore depended on the trust of other booksellers and their commercial networks to evade state control and circulate illegal print matter. This page showcases one of the book trade’s leading political publishers: Heinrich Hoff. A committed democrat, he typifies his profession’s savvy to combine profit with political principles. The revenues from his balanced list of print matter – newspapers, novels, history, and scientific treaties – enabled him to speculate on illicit political pamphlets and books. Hoff deftly gamed the censorship system and brought banned print to market. His civic courage is noteworthy but so is his goal to extend democratic ideas to common readers. Using formats of popular and middlebrow literature (e.g., magazines, almanacs, calendars), he condensed and simplified issues of freedom and political representation for social groups not privy to elite political philosophy. Using an expanding publishing landscape and the clandestine exchange networks of bookdealers, Hoff and other publishers promoted political literacy for the dawning era of mass politics. Hoff’s end is poignant. During the Revolution of 1848, Baden’s government arrested and imprisoned him. Having fled to the US, he died in 1852 penniless in New York City. These citizens of print and their role in creating a democratic public sphere beckon our attention.

Learn more about Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Payne's "Empire of Purity"

Eva Payne is assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. Her writing has appeared in publications, such as the Journal of Women’s History and Radical History Review.

Payne applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution, and reported the following:

A curious reader browsing Empire of Purity would be lucky to land on page ninety-nine! The page illustrates one of the book’s central arguments: US anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution efforts were a crucial means of extending US imperial power under the guise of protecting women. The page appears in the final section of chapter 3, which details the development of laws criminalizing “white slavery” in the early twentieth century. Anti-white slavery laws were paradoxical, designed both to protect “innocent” white American women from being kidnapped into prostitution, and to exclude and deport foreign prostitutes, whom officials painted as a danger to the nation. In addition to the domestic implementation of these laws, my book is interested in how they operated outside of the US mainland.

As the following passage demonstrates, US officials used white slavery laws to expand their authority in US territories like the Panama Canal Zone, as well as sovereign states like the Republic of Panama:

Preventing white slavery justified increasing US control over immigration to the Republic of Panama as well as the Canal Zone. The US government appointed an officer to work with US quarantine officials, as well as the Panamanian government, to forbid “undesirables” from entering the Republic, even though Panamanian officials licensed prostitution. Through his efforts, the officer reported, “a number of white-slave dealers and notorious prostitutes were thereby turned back and not permitted to debark and yet others were deterred from attempting to come into the Republic.” (99)

Through their war on white slavery, US officials on the isthmus of Panama took charge of crucial state functions, including policing immigration and prostitution.

In addition to presenting my argument about US empire, the page’s first sentences show how US officials used white slavery laws to police racial boundaries and maintain white supremacy. And the end of the page introduces evidence that despite US officials’ claims that they were rescuing victims of forced sex trafficking, many women migrated and sold sex because it was the best economic option available to them. What’s missing on the page, however, are the perspectives of women who sold sex, which are centered throughout the book. While the Page 99 Test doesn’t capture the full geographic scope of the book, which has chapters about Europe and Asia as well as the Americas, nor the extent of my source base, it gives the reader a surprisingly accurate sense of the book’s key interventions.

Visit Eva Payne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue