Slavery had been legally outlawed everywhere in the world by the end of the twentieth century. Yet as the millennium dawned, there was a revival of anti-slavery activism. In 2000, the long-established, British-based NGO Anti-Slavery International acquired a new US-based sister organization, Free the Slaves (the two have since severed their links), and many more anti-slavery NGOs were founded over the next twelve years in the US, Australia, and Western European countries, including Stop the Traffik, Not For Sale, End Slavery Now, CNN Freedom Project, Alliance Against Modern Slavery, and Walk Free Foundation. Building on claims about âhuman traffickingâ as a vast and growing organised criminal business that have been widely made by governmental and intergovernmental actors since the 1990s, and equating âtraffickingâ with slave-trading, this ânew abolitionistâ movement insists that slavery is not merely a persistent, but also an expanding global problem (Batstone 2007: 5).
In 1999, Kevin Bales, co-founder of the anti-slavery NGO, Free the Slaves, estimated that some 27 million souls were affected by âtraffickingâ and other forms of ânew slaveryâ. In 2013, the Walk Free Foundation, assisted by Bales, launched a report titled The Global Slavery Index (GSI), which enlarged that estimate to 29.8 million. The following year, the GSI set the number of âmodern slavesâ in the contemporary world at 35.8 million. The 2016 GSI expanded the estimate to 45.8. Figures like these are used to support the claim that there are now âmore slaves than at any time in human historyâ (McNally 2009).
The discourse of ânewâ or âmodernâ slavery invokes the past to frame the present not just in the sense that it identifies certain contemporary forms of oppression as equivalent to historical practices of enslavement, but also as a means of stressing the urgency of the present problem. The quantum of human suffering implied by ânew slaveryâ is even greater than that imposed by âold slaveryâ. Other differences between new and old slavery are also asserted. âTodayâs slavery focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning people like before, but about using them as completely disposable tools for making moneyâ (McNally 2009), and we are also told that whilst âethnic differencesâ were important to âold slaveryâ, todayâs slavers are âcolour-blindâ. It is said to be poverty, not racialised identity that renders individuals vulnerable to enslavement (Bales 1999, 2004). And unlike old slavery, new slavery is said to be a clandestine phenomenon. In an article for the Telegraph in 2013, British Prime Minister Theresa May (who was then the Home Secretary) asserted that âmodern slaveryâ is âhidden in plain sight. It is walking our streets, supplying shops and supermarkets, working in fields, factories or nail bars, trapped in brothels or cowering behind the curtains in an ordinary streetâ.
The task for contemporary anti-slavery activists is thus not so much to proselytise against slavery (which is now regarded as self-evidently wrong), but to expose crimes taking place in a concealed underworld, and to work with governments and civil society to prevent such crimes and to support their victims. The new abolitionists seek to âshine a light on slaveryâ (Kristine 2012). Their goal is to raise public awareness such that, as Theresa May (2013), quoting from William Wilberforce, said when introducing her Modern Slavery Bill, âyou may choose to look the other way but you can never again say that you did not knowâ. 1
By quoting from Wilberforce, May inserted herself into a narrative that constitutes a particular relation between pasts, presents, and futures (Scott 2004: 45). The story of ânewâ or âmodern slaveryâ promulgated by most politicians, policy makers, and journalists, as well as anti-slavery activists represents slavery as part of the barbarism of the past, abolished by modern liberal states in the nineteenth century; it appears as inimical to the present of liberal societies, and as something that will be entirely vanquished in the future when all the world is guided by liberal values. This is a linear tale that takes the idea of rupture with the past as its starting point and in which liberalism incrementally extends freedom to all. The âre-emergenceâ of slavery in the twenty-first century does not disrupt that narrative, it simply allows for a kind of abolitionist sequel in which the same liberal superhero is called back to vanquish the old enemy one more time.
This edited volume challenges the dominant discourse on ânewâ or âmodern slaveryâ by initiating an interdisciplinary dialogue between scholarship on the pasts of slavery and abolitionism, and research on phenomena that the new abolitionists discuss under the rubric of modern slavery (such as debt, child labour, forced labour, forced marriage), as well as on restraints on freedom typically overlooked by the new abolitionists (such as imprisonment). It critically interrogates the way in which the new abolitionism portrays the past as well as the present, not only because that portrayal is at odds with serious scholarship on slaveries historically, and on contemporary forms of exploitation, but also because it lends support to policies that are far from benign in their effects. In fact, the response of most governmentsâespecially in the affluent worldâto the new abolitionist campaign against âmodern slaveryâ has been to promise tighter policing, tougher sentencing, harsher immigration policies, and ever-stricter border controls. In other words, in the name of combatting modern slavery, states are pursuing policies that imply heavy restrictions, sometimes extremely violent restraints, on the freedoms of many migrants, and that do almost nothing to change the condition of those unable to move from contexts in which their rights, well-being, and even their lives are under threat. The policy response often further includes measures to suppress prostitution or eliminate child labour, again strengthening the punitive powers of states, and restricting the livelihood options available to women and teenagers without ensuring them realistic or sustainable alternatives.
âThe past of slavery has its many presents, and the present of exploitation its many pastsâ, Alice Bellagamba (2016) observes. Given this, and the extent and wealth of the available literatures on slaveries and on contemporary systems of domination, the volume necessarily provides only a very partial and incomplete survey of research on restraints on human freedom past and present. Because the discourse of ânewâ or âmodern slaveryâ that is under critique takes transatlantic slavery as the archetype of âold slaveryâ and a wrong that was righted by abolition, the volume attends to Atlantic world history, rather than to the histories of slaving in the ancient world or in other regions. Our aim in keeping this focus is to move away from the idea of rupture and from the ahistoricism of âmodern slaveryâ discourse. However, we hope that the contributions to this volume will serve to invigorate further debate on the theory and practice of representing slavery and related systems of domination, and more rigorous interrogation of the binary between slavery and freedom in different historical and political contexts. This introductory chapter contextualises those contributions by exploring how the multiple pasts of slavery and exploitation have been, and are, selectively remembered and forgotten in abolitionist thinking.
From Slavery to Anti-slavery
Different forms of slavery are known to have existed in prehistoric societies and to have been present historically in most regions of the world. Slavery was âa major institution in antiquityâ, and one that did not disappear with other ancient institutions at the end of the Roman Empire (Thomas 1997: 25). Throughout the early Middle Ages, âslaves constituted a highly prized section of the population of Europeâ and though the institution of slavery withered in North West Europe during the eleventh century, it persisted in other regions (Thomas 1997: 34). Indeed, the Mediterranean slave trade of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, through which mostly Venetian and Genoese merchants supplied sugar-producing Crusader states with enslaved Slavs from the Dalmatian Coast (and others from the Black Sea region), is said to have foreshadowed the transatlantic trade in terms of its organization (Angela Davis 2003).
Robin Blackburn (2011: 8â9) reminds us that whilst slaveholding has âbeen quite common in human societiesâ, it has not always been âof structural importance to the ruling groupââin fact, âfully fledged slave societies have been quite rareâ. Nonetheless, considered against slaveryâs ubiquity in human history, the contemporary global consensus on its wrongness is remarkable. The fight against it is now âone of the very few human rights imperatives that attracts no principled dissentâ (Hathaway 2008: 7). As Thomas Haskell observes, though many free people in slave societies had pitied slaves, and philosophers and moralists had long acknowledged that slavery was ethically difficult, until the middle decades of the eighteenth century, it was generally regarded âas nothing worse than a regrettable but necessary evilâ (1998: 302, emphasis in the original). Then:
in little more than a century, slavery was suddenly transformed from a troubling but readily defensible institution into a self-evidently intolerable relic of barbarism, noxious to decent people everywhere. On a historical scale of reckoning, this reversal of opinion occurred overnight (Haskell 1998: 302).
So great was the volte face, in fact, that where in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European colonial ventures in the Americas were widely understood to necessitate slave trading and chattel slavery, by the end of the nineteenth century, European and North American colonial ventures in Africa were legitimated, in part, as necessary to cleanse the âdark continentâ of barbaric practices such as slavery and slave trading. Even King Leopold IIâs deadly regime in the Congo was initially authorised as a humanitarian and philanthropic intervention (Quirk 2011).
The reasons for this relatively abrupt shift in perceptions of slavery in Western Europe and North America have been much debated. Eric Williamsâ (1944) now classic Capitalism and Slavery opened one strand of debate by arguing that the exigencies of capitalist economic development, not humanitarian high thinking, were the primary impetus for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. The idea of an association between the rise of capitalism and the fall of Atlantic world slavery is now widely accepted, but the exact nature of the link is disputed. David Brion Davis has made particularly important interventions through his focus on how, âby defining slavery as a unique moral aberration, the [antislavery] ideology tended to give sanction to the prevailing economic orderâ, namely, a capitalist order in which âfreeâ wage labour was to play a central role (1992: 63; see also Ashworth 1992; Davis 1966, 1975, 2014; Foner 1995; Genovese 1965). The abolition campaigns of late eighteenth-century England were highly political, with a great deal to say about slavery and property, and owning a property in the person, and about the rights of free-born Englishmen and how to preserve them from encroaching despotism. Their selectivity in focusing on natural rights and on the slave trade (rather than on slavery) allowed reformers to project âthe social costs and amorality of growing capitalism onto slavery in politically safely remote West Indian coloniesâ (Miller 2012: 7).
In the period when anti-slavery thought developed its support, there was also growing public knowledge of the extremely harsh conditions experienced by wage labourers in Europe and North America. Chartists and labour rights activists spoke passionately against the abject squalor in which wage labourers lived, hungered, and died in industrial cities, depicting their âfreedomâ as but the liberty to starve, sometimes describing their situation as âwhiteâ or âwage-slaveryâ. As Tommy Lott points out in Chapter 2 of this volume, the distinction between slavery and drudgery was not always easy to draw, and slavery always overlapped with other forms of servitude. Yet the key figures of the original British abolitionist movement were not also agitating on behalf of servants and wage workers. In fact, many of them were themselves employers with strong views on the need for servants to be industrious, diligent, sober, faithful, and respectful to their Mastersâtheir âdenunciation of colonial slavery⌠implied no taste for a freer or more equal societyâ (Davis 1992: 95). This was true in relation to racial (and gender) as well as class, inequalities.
Through the transatlantic slave trade, âslavery became indelibly linked throughout the Western Hemisphere with people of African descent⌠the dishonor, humiliation, and bestialization that had universally been associated with chattel slavery no...