Today, almost 30 million people are estimated to be trapped in modern forms of bondage despite international prohibitions of slavery proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956). These include some 4.5 million victims of sexual exploitation and some three million people who are trafficked each year. However, there is little concerted response to modern forms of bondage and human trafficking. Indeed, some experts argue that recent globalization has accentuated human bondage.1 An affront to human rights, modern bondage and human trafficking endanger political and economic stability, as well as public health in regions where they are prominent, notably in Africa and Asia. Anti-Slavery International (ASI) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) highlight three main reasons for the concentration of human servitude in these regions: poverty and illiteracy; the unwillingness or inability of local governments to enforce anti-slavery legislation; and the hands-off attitude of Western governments who consider bondage to be the concern of African and Asian authorities.
There are additional reasons. One is poor and scattered information gathering. Another is that governments, and concerned non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as ASI, the ILO, and the United Nations Childrenâs Fund (UNICEF), employ different definitions of slavery and servile labour. For example, while Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves (the American sister organization of ASI) estimates that some 27 million people are trapped in modern forms of bondage,2 UNICEF considers that child bondage (children working below the age of 14 years) alone involves 250 million children, the bulk of whom live in Africa and Asia, most notably in India.3 A further problem is widespread ignorance of the embedded structures and historical roots of contemporary bondage. This largely explains the apathy of Western governments towards human servitude in Africa and Asia. In the West, there is a general identification of âslaveryâ with the Atlantic slave trade against which European and North American governments successfully campaigned, and which finally ended with formal abolition in Brazil in 1888. Thus, in the 2007 bicentenary celebrations of the British Anti-Slave Trade Act of 1807, only the Atlantic slave trade received recognition. This focus is reinforced by the UNESCO Slave Route Project and European and American educational syllabi. However, recent research demonstrates the existence of large and vibrant slave systems in Africa and Asia that not only predated, co-existed with, and in some instances overlapped with the Atlantic system, but also continued in modified forms well into the twenty-first century. Moreover, such studies demonstrate that concepts of âslaveryâ and âfreedomâ derived from an Atlantic slave paradigm are often inapplicable in Africa and Asia where there existed a far greater variety of forms of bondage than in the Americas. While chattel slavery existed, it was rarely dominant, and often overlapped with other types of servitude, the characteristics of which, as demonstrated in some of the following chapters, were highly time and culture specific. In Africa and Asia, most humans trafficked were probably women and children. The greatest slave traffic was overland, notably within Africa, South Asia, and the Far East. The slave trade commenced as early as 2000 BCE in Mesopotamia, and has continued across Africa and Asia to the present day, so that the cumulative number of slaves traded in these regions probably well exceeded the 12.5 million-odd slaves shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas. India alone had an estimated eight to nine million indigenous slaves in 1841âdouble the number of black slaves in the United States on the eve of abolition in 1865.
This forms the justification for this book, which offers a structural analysis of historical and contemporary forms of bondage in Africa and Asia and the changes they have undergone since circa 1800. China and India constitute major emerging economic powers that historically played highly important roles in the Indian Ocean World (IOW) economy. By contrast, Africa is home to some of the worldâs poorest countries. Moreover, whereas democratic influences run deep in India, they are suppressed in China and have only nominal influence in many parts of Africa. As human rights form the foundation of democracy, the perpetuation of large-scale human bondage in Africa and Asia poses major threats to political and economic stability within those regions and worldwide. This volume aims to establish the relevant historical context for human bondage in Africa and Asia, and trace over the longue durĂ©e linkages between punctual shocks such as adverse environmental events, conflict, market instability, and crop failure, and threats to human security such as impoverishment, violence, migration, kidnapping, and enslavement.
This handbookâs chief goal is thus to undertake a historical and economic analysis of the changing structure of forced labour and human trafficking in Africa and Asia, and study the relationship between these phenomena and insecurity and poverty since the emergence of the modern capitalist era. The handbook will help through key archival (colonial, national, communal, judicial, and organizational) research, interviews, and databases on human migration and environmental events and their consequences, to:
- clarify the complex and shifting historical and current relationships between economic, political, social, and environmental factors that have formed the context for the development of both historical and contemporary forms of bondage and human trafficking in Africa and Asia;
- inform research into human servitude and people trafficking elsewhere in the world;
- bring to the forefront of the research agenda the historical and contemporary dimensions of bondage in the global south.
Definitions
Throughout this volume, the issue of definitions is critical. Of central importance is the meaning of the term âslaveâ. Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have all highlighted different aspects of labour relationships from within the framework of their respective disciplines in an attempt to distinguish âfreeâ from âforcedâ labour. Social status (e.g. membership of, or exclusion from, clan and family structures or local communities), religion, legal status (e.g. forms of dependence), socio-economic conditions (e.g. dependency, coercion), political rights, and legal (or procedural) rights have all been widely debated.4 However, researchers have failed to reach consensus on any of these issues, in part because they cannot be confined to the academic sphere. Debates about human bondage and trafficking have pitted international human rights organizations against countries and firms they have accused of clandestinely practising and legitimizing them.5 Such debates have been compounded by the use of multiple and highly variant definitions of forced labour and its scope, which in turn compromise efforts to counteract the phenomenon.
Conventional studies of bondage and human trafficking demonstrate two related limitations: an inability to either move beyond specific case studies and engage in wider comparative geographical and temporal investigations, or ensure that wider comparative studies take sufficient cognizance of both the variety of local conditions and trans-local contexts.6 Conventional slavery studies fail to adequately connect the local and global, the past and present.
Most Western scholars define âslaveâ within the paradigm of the Atlantic slave system wherein mainly young African males were shipped to white-owned plantations and mines in the Americas. There, through coerced productive labour and reproduction, they bore their ownersâ dividends. As Paul Lovejoy emp...