MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

BY CHARLES SUMNER.

“HISTORY has been sometimes called a gallery, where, in living forms, are preserved the scenes, the incidents, and the characters of the past. It may also be called the world's great charnel house, where are gathered coffins, dead men's bones, and all the uncleanness of the years that have fled.”

Massachusetts. JOHN P. JEWETT AND COMPANY, 1853. 134p.

by Maya Esslemont

In recent years, the concept of ‘modern slavery’ has garnered significant academic, political and media interest. However political momentum, which peaked at the advent of the Modern Slavery Act’s passage in 2015, has now waned.1 Whilst there is some public data on modern slavery referrals, decisions and the characteristics of victims, practitioners still struggle to access reliable evidence on prevention, support, or identification. Inconsistent data access makes it difficult to assess the Government’s performance in addressing the drivers of exploitation or empowering survivors to recover. The influence of ‘data gaps’ cannot be understated. In the course of this research, professionals from a wide range of sectors reported that they have had to reconfigure or completely abandon projects due to a lack of available public data. Interviewees told us that planned work exploring survivors’ access to safe housing, the criminalisation of young victims, homelessness, and survivors’ health outcomes were amongst topics shelved due to a lack of evidence. Journalists told of having to drop reports on individual survivors’ stories, or emerging concerns held by practitioners, in the absence of national statistics.

Yet, where data is published, the output was often described as inaccurate, inconsistent, lacking in detail, or undermined by the bias of data producers’ chosen framing or ‘narratives’. In the absence of modern slavery statistics which meet the needs of practitioners, participants extolled the virtues of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) or Freedom of Information (FOI) requests as forms of evidence gathering (see 3. Requesting data). However, these methods come with challenges. The diminishing quality of data responses, coupled with the dwindling capacity and confidence of practitioners, deter many from asking for evidence in the first place. Through ‘A can of worms’: Challenges and opportunities in gathering modern slavery evidence, After Exploitation evaluates the needs of a diverse range of practitioners who use modern slavery evidence as part of their day-to-day work, alongside a five-person panel of experts with lived experience (the ‘PELE’). Recommendations for improving transparency and public data were shared by practitioners and the panel, and we have grouped data recommendations into six policy areas, explored in order of recommendation frequency: Entitlements and survivor outcomes (n=41); Immigration and enforcement (n=35); Policy monitoring and transparency (n=33), NRM recording (n=32), prevention (n=28) and criminal justice (n=21).

London: After Exploitation, 2024. 82p.

By Cody Corliss

The Article examines the relationship between trafficking and enslavement in light of recent calls from activists to prosecute trafficking as an international crime. Although human trafficking has repeatedly been denounced as "modern slavery," there remains significant distinctions between the crimes of enslavement and trafficking. Enslavement is an international crime that may be prosecuted in international courts and tribunals in addition to national courts. Trafficking, on the other hand, is a transnational crime restricted to domestic courts.

Under certain circumstances, however, trafficking crimes may constitute the crime of enslavement, as the definition of enslavement in the Statute of the International Criminal Court recognizes. Given their overlap, this Article examines the relationship between trafficking and enslavement, utilizing their respective histories of prohibition and criminalization and judgments at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and European Court for Human Rights.

South Carolina Law Review, Vol. 71, No. 3, 2020, WVU College of Law Research Paper No. 2024-008.

Edited by Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe

This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well as the imaginaries and representations of slaves rather than the trade in slaves itself.

Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020.332p.

Edited by Damian A. Pargas, Juliane Schiel

This open access handbook takes a comparative and global approach to analyse the practice of slavery throughout history. To understand slavery - why it developed, and how it functioned in various societies – is to understand an important and widespread practice in world civilisations. With research traditionally being dominated by the Atlantic world, this collection aims to illuminate slavery that existed in not only the Americas but also ancient, medieval, North and sub-Saharan African, Near Eastern, and Asian societies. Connecting civilisations through migration, warfare, trade routes and economic expansion, the practice of slavery integrated countries and regions through power-based relationships, whilst simultaneously dividing societies by class, race, ethnicity and cultural group. Uncovering slavery as a globalising phenomenon, the authors highlight the slave-trading routes that crisscrossed Africa, helped integrate the Mediterranean world, connected Indian Ocean societies and fused the Atlantic world. Split into five parts, the handbook portrays the evolution of slavery from antiquity to the contemporary era and encourages readers to realise similarities and differences between various manifestations of slavery throughout history. Providing a truly global coverage of slavery, and including thematic injections within each chronological part, this handbook is a comprehensive and transnational resource for all researchers interested in slavery, the history of labour, and anthropology.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 716p.

By Stephan Conermann, Claudia Rauhut, Ulrike Schmieder and Michael Zeuske

In the recent cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects are intertwined with interest in cultural tourism and sites of the memory of enslavement. Questions of historical guilt and present responsibility have become a source of social conflict, particularly in multicultural societies with an enslaving past. This became apparent in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, controversial debates about streets and places named after them re-ignited, and the European Union apologized for slavery after the racist murder of George Floyd. Related debates focus on museums, on artworks acquired unjustly in societies under colonial rule, the question of whether and how museums should narrate the hidden past of enslavement and colonialism, including their own colonial origins with respect to narratives about presumed European supremacy, and the need to establish new monuments for the enslaved, their resistance, and abolitionists of African descent.

Berlin/Boston:DeGruyter, 2024, 352p.

by Stephan Conermann, Mariana Dias Paes, Roberto Hofmeister Pich and Paulo Cruz Terra

Slavery Studies are one of the most consolidated fields in Brazilian historiography with various discussions on issues like slave agency, slavery and law, slavery and capitalism, slave families, demography of slavery, transatlantic slave trade, abolition etc. Taking into consideration these new trends of Brazilian slavery studies, this volume of collected articles allows leading scholars to present their research to a broader academic community.

Berlin/Boston, DeGruyter, 2023. 347p.

Edited by: Kate Ekama , Lisa Hellman and Matthias van Rossum

The study of slavery and coerced labour is increasingly conducted from a global perspective, and yet a dual Eurocentric bias remains: slavery primarily brings to mind the images of Atlantic chattel slavery, and most studies continue to be based – either outright or implicitly – on a model of northern European wage labour. This book constitutes an attempt to re-centre that story to Asia. With studies spanning the western Indian Ocean and the steppes of Central Asia to the islands of South East Asia and Japan, and ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this book tracks coercion in diverse forms, tracing both similarities and differences – as well as connections – between systems of coercion, from early sales regulations to post-abolition labour contracts. Deep empirical case studies, as well as comparisons between the chapters, all show that while coercion was entrenched in a number of societies, it was so in different and shifting ways. This book thus not only shows the history of slavery and coercion in Asia as a connected story, but also lays the groundwork for global studies of a phenomenon as varying, manifold and contested as coercion.

Bonn: De Gruyter, 2022. 228p.

by Clifford Griffith Roe and B. S. Steadwell.

Or Fighting for the Protection of Our Girls. Truthful and chaste account op the hideous trade op buying and selling young girls for immoral purposes. startling disclosures made by white slaves during the trials of many pro- curers and traders. the cruel and inhuman treatment of white slaves. the astounding confession of a pander. graphic accounts of how white slaves are ensnared and a full exposi- tion of the methods and schemes used to lure and trap the girls. —also—Containing a Full Account of the Great Fight for the Suppression of White Slavery and the Great Movement for Purity in Our Homes.

London: Roe, 1911. 494p.

By Mrs. Archibald MacKirdy and W. N. Willis.

No one to whom Eate or Providence has been kind cares to step from pleasant everyday ways of life into treacherous and dangerous paths which lead to suffering and unpopularity. No man or woman who has within grasp means of following a pleasant way in life would accept a grievous charge and painful labour, save for conscience' sake, and with the hope of waking public opinion to its duty in a matter of national importance.written about, but the part of it relating to the East has not been previously dealt within a volume of this kind. Even in this country the fearful trade has not much diminished. It is quite true that some very notorious houses or rendezvous have beenclosed, and that one restaurant which washaunted by the unhappy women who have nomeans of getting a living but by selling themselves to men, has been raided and shut up.But this was chiefly done by the work of theSalvation Army, as I know, for I went outwith the midnight workers and saw what washappening.

London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1912. 346p.

By O. EdwardJanney.

There seems to be need for a description of the white slave traffic in this country, and for some account of the movement that has arisen for its suppression, together with a discussion of the methods that may be employed to accomplish that end. There are multitudes of parents, teachers and other persons having charge of young people, who are unaware of the dangers that threaten young women through the adroit agents of this traffic. These need to be informed.

New York: National Vigilance Committee, 1911. 203p.