'Sex tourism for the white male is a way of escaping to the past. To recover that sense of male authority you have to go abroad' David Dabydeen, Forbidden Fruit

Spas and watering places in the 18th century used to offer the wealthy and well-to-do the opportunity to take the waters. But there was also a range of other more worldly pleaures. The Grand Tour, for example, was a means of encountering not merely the artistic heritage of Europe, but the sexual temptations of distant societies.

The modern age of travel – ushered in by trains and steamboats – enabled the prosperous to sample even more distant delights. North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean offered Europeans a range of sexual pleasures unobtainable at home. The tradition set by sailors and the thousands of men serving in distant postings was now shared by growing numbers of adventurous tourists. Women for hire flattered white visitors with sexual delights, sometimes laced with drugs, unimaginable in Europe. White men, dark-skinned women – the traffic was all one way.

New shipping routes and modern communications opened up exotic regions to the outside gaze and visits. The Suez Canal brought Egypt within reach and the early 20th century saw the arrival of tour ships from North America to the Caribbean and South America – driven by sexual as much as social curiosity. From the days of slavery, the Caribbean had been associated in the white imagination with sexual excess and pleasure.

The net widened again with the development of modern tourism – but especially in the 1960s with the advance of jet and charter travel. Europeans and North Americans were able to fly huge distances cheaply, for sun, sea – and sex.

In the West Indies, in Africa and South East Asia, poor local people offered wealthy visitors from the north anything they wanted. Thus, from Thailand to Mombassa, from Montego Bay to Bali, tourists could take whatever sexual pleasure in whatever colour they fancied.

Now, however, it was not simply a male industry. Women too joined the sex tourists. In part this was because of the rise of female prosperity and independence. But for them too was the added spice of the widely-held belief in black sexual potency: that black men could provide sexual pleasure unobtainable elsewhere. And though not always approved of, sex between white women and black men had lost the bitter hostility so common in the past.

The growth of post-1945 black communities in northern Europe and familiarity of living side by side as neighbours has done nothing to abate the armies of white tourists. Still they flock in their thousands to distant locations to indulge their fantasies of sexual pleasure with dark skin.