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The white slave trade can be seen as the archetype of the globalisation of a specific phenomenon: prostitution. Numerous authors, newspapers and world congresses widely condemned the idea of a vast sex trade from the late 19th century up until the First World War. Over the last decades, researchers have deconstructed what appeared to be a tangible reality. The aim of this paper is to retrace these historiographical debates in order to reassess, from a gender studies perspective, what used to be analysed in terms of women’s passivity and forced mobility. It also aims to consider the white slave trade from the point of view of the history of voluntary migration, labor mobility and global crime. Finally, by reconstructing the transnational trajectories and life histories of prostitutes, pimps and all those involved in the trafficking process, it aims to uncover a new approach of the social interactions and economic transactions involved both in sex trafficking and the denunciation of it.