by Freedom- The Overthrow of the Slave Empires (retail) (epub)
The post-war public outrage about these events fuelled a determination that nothing like that must happen again (though much the same had been felt and said after 1918). The European trials after the Second World War saw 5,000 people convicted of war crimes, with 486 people executed.[9] The legal processes initiated at Nuremberg were to have the most profound impact on the subsequent story of slavery and abolition. The concepts of both genocide and crimes against humanity were henceforth securely anchored in international law. Moreover, the concept of slavery itself had been widened to embrace forms of bondage previously excluded. Debt bondage, serfdom, human trafficking and forced marriages, all were enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the new United Nations in December 1948. Article Four simply asserted: ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.’[10]
The United Nations, founded by the major victors of the Second World War, changed rapidly in the wake of the demise of the world’s major empires, with the proliferation of independent nations from the 1950s onwards. Colonies and possessions were transformed into independent nation states and the founding UN membership of 51 nations quickly increased. Today it stands at 193. In 1956 the United Nations incorporated an anti-slavery Convention, agreed by the League of Nations thirty years before, into a new ‘Supplementary Convention’. To gain admission, each state had to sign up the UN’s Charter, and that involves being formally abolitionist. Whatever reservations some of those new nations may have had (and some had been infamous for tolerating slavery at home), they had to agree, in public at least, to abide by the diplomatic conventions of abolition. In a fundamental break with the past, abolition had become a defining characteristic of a modern, civilised state. Not to agree to abolition was to be consigned to diplomatic isolation. Not surprisingly, no nation was willing to accept such a stigma, and by the late twentieth century the universal imperative was to be abolitionist. Abolition had triumphed and had become the globally accepted norm. To be an opponent of slavery had become a definition of civilisation itself.
Freedom from enslavement and slavery was now accepted as a universal human right, and slavery was defined as a crime against humanity. In the nineteenth century, it had been pressure from powerful Western nations that imposed abolition on erring societies: in the late twentieth century, it was the consensus of international law and diplomacy, exercised primarily through the UN, that attacked slavery and slave trading.
And yet, for all the commitments and universal agreements, for all the grandiloquence of moral principles . . . did it work?
In the early twenty-first century, with all the world’s sovereign states in agreement that slavery is a crime against humanity, slavery has once again become a source of domestic and international concern. How are we to explain this in the light of everything that had happened at Nuremberg, and of the legal, political and diplomatic onslaught against slavery since 1945?
In what was a remarkable twist in the familiar story, a number of Western societies were shocked to discover that slavery was alive and well – and not merely in distant places. Western Europe at large and the USA became aware of the existence of slavery at home. It was most striking and troubling in the form of people who had been trafficked. Large numbers of enslaved people were being moved long distances by organised gangs of criminals. The slave traders, once an accepted feature of commercial life, were now international outlaws. Their victims sought safety, work and a better life in the West, and often travelled from the far reaches of the globe to find it. Many left home as economic migrants seeking to improve themselves, but many were enslaved people: transported, controlled, and then employed after arrival by complex and rapacious criminal gangs. However different from the world of slavery and slave trading familiar to Western eyes, what was exposed were systems that trafficked unfree people into the West. Once there, the victims were used as enslaved labourers in a number of major industries.
At first, it was tempting to dismiss or minimise the problem by pointing to the obvious differences between, say, the ordeal of plantation slaves and an unfree domestic worker employed in London or New York. But as evidence mounted, as the numbers involved became clearer and as the life stories were teased from the miserable victims, the scale and nature of the problem became indisputable – and more troubling. In the early years of the twenty-first century, researchers had begun to expose a massive global problem of slavery. The most eminent of scholars in the field have persuasively argued that, at the time of writing, there are more than thirty million enslaved people. It is, moreover, a problem that seems to subvert the West’s historical efforts to end slavery globally. Alarm about slavery was revived though the realisation that slavery existed not simply in distant or poor countries, but in the West itself.
Slavery in Britain, for example, had not been a serious issue since the late years of the eighteenth century and was abolished in 1834. Now, almost two centuries later, slavery in Britain became a matter of widespread discussion. Today, the news media, political forums and courtrooms are thick with slavery issues. So serious had the problem become in the early twenty-first century that the British Parliament passed the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. It was designed to ‘Give law enforcement the tools to fight modern slavery, ensure perpetrators can receive suitably severe punishment for these appalling crimes and enhance support and protection for victims.’[11]
Lending substance to these concerns, some spectacular examples of modern slavery and slave trading regularly surface in the British media. Albanian gangs were jailed for trafficking women into British prostitution (2007); Polish gangs trafficked Polish workers as slave labour into Britain (2017); a Roma gang from the Czech Republic controlled gangs of vulnerable people as slaves in Plymouth; Lithuanian gang-masters imported fellow countrymen as slaves into Sheffield. Finally, and at the time of writing, a family of travellers in Lincolnshire was able to live in some style on the proceeds of eighteen slaves (mainly vulnerable people), controlled with great cruelty, some for upwards of twenty-six years. The severe jail sentences – ranging from five to twenty years – reflected both the seriousness of the offences and the outrage felt by the courts.[12]
In recent years, it has been difficult, in Britain, not to notice the discussion about contemporary slavery. Even as I was writing this book, I saw an official notice at Manchester Airport in December 20017:
Slavery still exists.
If you suspect it, report it.
The notice was stuck on a wall in a men’s lavatory in Terminal 2.
Such anecdotal evidence is unexceptional in modern-day Britain: it litters the press, the airwaves and political debate. Scarcely a week goes by without mention being made of slavery, and especially of slavery in Britain itself, much of it about people trafficked to Britain as slaves to work in prostitution, agriculture, domestic work or catering. It is thought that perhaps 14,000 women and children have been trafficked into Britain in the past twenty years, despite a battery of legislation to prevent such movements.
Though the total numbers seem relatively small, the very existence of slaves in Britain sent ripples of curious doubt through society, with reactions ranging from disbelief to disgust. Such revelations shook some basic assumptions about national identity. After all, it had been the British who had led the attack on slavery for two centuries: they were the people who even defined themselves as the embodiment of anti-slavery. In 2007, for instance, there had been extravagant and nationwide commemorations of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Powerful cultural forces remain at work serving to define abolition as part of the British national identity: being opposed to slavery has become quintessentially British. Revelations about slave routes into Britain, and slaves in Britain itself in the early twenty-first century, came as a profound shock to many.
Evidence from the US is even more remarkable, but perhaps not surprising given the geographic and demographic immensity of the States. An es
timated 15,000 people are trafficked into the USA each year. In 2004, 49 per cent worked in the sex industry, 27 per cent in domestic work and 10 per cent in agriculture. The largest numbers of people trafficked into the USA come from China, Mexico and Vietnam, and they are controlled (at great expense to the victims) mainly by gangs of their own nationality or ethnicity. Well-defined routes emerged for the movement of trafficked victims from their homelands into the major cities of the USA. Once there, they could easily disappear into well-established ethnic and national communities. Trafficking has clearly become a massive industry characterised by devious illegality, violence – and handsome rewards for the gangs running the systems.[13] The historical incongruity is startling: Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863 – yet scholars calculate that there are between 100,000 and 150,000 slaves living in the USA today.[14]
Despite the initial disbelief, the mounting evidence could not be disputed. It was possible, of course, to take some comfort from knowing that the slavery involved was quite unlike slavery in the Americas. But this also created a problem. The types of modern slavery exposed in Britain and the USA differed so markedly from the history of Africans shipped to the Americas that it was hard to persuade many people that it really was slavery. Perhaps we needed a different word, a different definition, to describe the bondage that had found a home in the West? An obvious and simple question arises: what do we mean by slavery? This is the very question historians have been wrestling with for years.[15]
Modern slavery is now recognised as a global phenomenon. The agencies working against slavery – notably that doughty survivor from the original campaign, the British Anti-Slavery Society in London – regularly investigate and report on slavery in all corners of the globe. To learn, in the twenty-first century, that forms of slavery continue to survive in distant parts of the world came as no surprise. It also fitted the West’s sense of superiority and reinforced the distinctions it drew between itself and the wider world: it was much more comfortable with a discussion that focused on slavery as an alien institution, foreign – something found in distant societies. The West had come to believe that slavery was wrong, and had spent a great deal of political and diplomatic capital preventing it. Now, despite the UN, despite international treaties, despite a shoal of national laws, bilateral and multilateral agreements – it was clear that slavery endured, and literally right under our own noses.
For years, anti-slavery campaigners had exposed slavery in various parts of the world, often on a major scale, and always in defiance of international law and treaties. Hereditary slavery had survived in parts of Africa, debt bondage was widespread in South Asia, child slavery – notably in the form of child soldiers – had flourished in conflicts in Africa, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The seizure of women for forced marriage was widespread.
What became apparent in the twenty-first century, however, was that slavery was remarkably adaptable: it changed contours to suit changing circumstances. It was especially evasive and devious in the hands of those profiting from it. And therein lies a key. Behind contemporary slavery lie some basic economic facts. We now know that the price of modern slaves has fallen worldwide – for simple and obvious reasons. Massive population growth has created armies of poor people desperate for any means of survival. To put it crudely, there is a huge global labour market waiting to be exploited. From a world population of 7.1 billion people, 900 million live below the accepted standard for extreme poverty. For large numbers of people, enslavement is a consequence of poverty. Acquiring slaves thus became incredibly cheap. When we make historical comparisons, the evidence is astonishing. Present-day slaves cost only a fraction of the price of slaves bought in the US South before 1860: a representative price for a modern slave is $90, compared to the equivalent cost of $1,200 for a field hand in the American South in 1850.[16] Conflict and warfare – with the consequent collapse of law and order (sometimes the total collapse of the nation state) can also provide fertile ground for recruiting slaves. This has been the case in parts of Africa, notably Congo, and in Europe after the Balkan conflicts. Slavery has also thrived in countries plagued by corruption, which is itself often a symptom of the decline of law and order. Furthermore, enslaving poor people is almost free of risk for the slavers in societies where law enforcement is poor or sometimes non-existent. The outcome by the early years of the twenty-first century is that, despite a battery of laws, and in the face of formal disapproval of the wider world, slaves were cheap and acquiring them involved little threat of ramifications for those involved.[17]
The existence of modern slavery is, then, beyond dispute, but: it is more difficult to be precise about its size. Any persuasive analysis (and programme of action to combat slavery) requires a clear understanding of the data involved, and the increased scrutiny of slavery in the early years of the new century prompted sophisticated analyses of the problem. Previously, discussion had been based on guesswork and hearsay. Now, complex statistical and social analyses have been employed to extract precise data. (This was, after all, the exact route travelled by historians of the slave trade. The guesswork of earlier generations was set aside by pioneering statistical analysis culminating in the Slave Trade Database.) Problems remain, of course, but we can now talk with some assurance about the numbers involved in present-day slavery. In 2013, the Global Slavery Index offered a figure of 29.8 million slaves worldwide.[18] Britain’s most eminent scholars of modern slavery recently accepted a figure of 35.8 million. We also know where those slaves live. More than three-quarters of the world’s slaves are found in a mere ten countries. (India, with fourteen million, tops the table.) Such massive figures, however, need to be set in the context of a global population of more than seven billion people. Similarly, the estimated annual profits from slavery, of $150 billion, need to be set against a global economy of $87 trillion. In the words of Kevin Bales, the data illustrates that while slavery is non-trivial, it is proportionately a very small part of the global population and global economy’.[19] Not only that, but the importance of slavery has been reduced over time.
Do such qualifications matter? They can do nothing, of course, to diminish the sufferings of the millions of people who continue to be trapped by modern slavery. Nor do they mitigate the crimes of the modern criminal gangs enriched by slavery.[20] But we are left with a deeply puzzling irony. Slavery is illegal the world over and lacks any moral or religious support. It is confronted by the universal culture of abolition – and that culture originated and developed in the campaign to overthrow the slave empires of the Americas. No one in their right mind would openly support slavery today. But what comfort is that to at least thirty million people who find themselves enslaved?
Conclusion
WHENEVER SLAVES WERE freed, they joined together in communal and exuberant celebrations, gathering in the nearest town, filling the streets with boisterous delight, and flocking in huge numbers to places of worship to give thanks for their liberation. They danced, sang, drank and gave elated thanks for freedom. In Jamaica in 1838, they crowded their chapels to give thanks. In Washington in 1866, the streets with packed with 3,000 celebrating freed slaves, and similar scenes were repeated in major American cities and in every colonial capital whenever the day of freedom dawned.[1] Freed slaves overwhelmingly celebrated formal emancipation peacefully.
Perhaps the most astonishing feature of these moments of delirious release was their contrast with the bleakness and the suffering that had gone before. This most brutal of systems ended in celebration. It was as if centuries of the brutality and cruelty of slavery had been waved away in the euphoria of freedom. Slave owners expected something quite different. They feared the worst, assuming that their former slaves would seek revenge. Slave owners failed to recognise that their deepest fears were a reflection of their own behaviour: a glimpse into the paranoia that afflicted the masters in all slave societies. Since time out of mind, they had held their slaves in subjugation by formal and informal violence, dol
ing out ad hoc punishments whenever they felt it necessary – or simply when they felt like it. When pressed, they called in help from neighbours, local armed forces and, in extremis, colonial armies and navies, to keep the slaves in their place. Their deep-seated fear was that this legacy of oppression would return to haunt and punish them.
Why, then, would slaves not respond in kind? Why should they forget the indignities of past? Quite apart from the slaves’ commonplace hardships, there were untold numbers of slaves – millions in the case of Brazil and the USA – whose families and loved ones had been torn apart by slavery. For them, freedom prompted a desperate (and mainly fruitless) search to find and, with luck, be reunited with lost loved ones. For them, freedom involved the permanent heartache of family loss, and their lamentations echoed down to modern times. Slave owners were aware of all this. After all, they had brought it about, and they feared that they had built a rod for their own back: slaves’ profound grievances all led to the slave owners’ door.
Ninety years passed between the overthrow of Haitian slavery and the freeing of Brazil’s slaves in 1888, but American slavery itself survived, in one form or another, for more than four centuries. It had proved tenacious and adaptable, creeping from one industry to another, bending and re-forming to the changing demands of American life. It started in the early days of European colonisation and it ended in the age of steam. The first African slaves in the Americas toiled at onerous pioneering fieldwork: America’s last slaves worked alongside modern machines, and their products were shipped to distant markets by steam-powered trains and ships. In the USA, Cuba and Brazil, large numbers of slaves escaped from slavery by taking a train to freedom.
Africans and their offspring in the Americas made possible some of the most notable transformations in mass consumption in modern history. Europeans learned to love sweet drinks and food (hence their rotten teeth). North Americans consumed coffee on an enormous scale. People everywhere smoked tobacco in staggering volumes, and countless millions, in all corners of the world, dressed in cheap cotton clothing which, like sweet drinks and tobacco, had their roots in the history of slavery in the Americas. But were the world’s consumers even aware of what the slaves had made possible? And here lies one of the main problems in trying to understand slavery. Its victims were, in the main, out of sight and out of mind. The metropolitan heartlands – and, later, the rest of the world – enjoyed the benefits of slavery without paying too much attention to the human cost involved.