Children in Slavery through the Ages ed. by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (review)

The literature on historical slavery and the slave trade, especially the transatlantic slave trade, is now extensive, the latter in particular offering very detailed accounts as a trade which was commercially driven, thus recorded often in minute detail. Virtually all of this literature, however, is about adult slaves (some of it written by slaves themselves, such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, published in England late in the eighteenth century). We have far less knowledge in the public domain about the circumstances of children in slavery. This book, an edited collection of twelve papers written by scholars, mainly from the United States but including contributions from writers based in Korea, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong, is therefore welcome as a modest attempt to fill this important gap in our knowledge. It is also important because, as the editors remind us, ‘it is possible that children currently constitute a large proportion of the victims of the various forms of “modern” slavery.’ This is certainly the case: the International Labour Organisation’s conventions and reports on forced labour, and the Trafficking in People and Council of Europe reports emanating from the United States and Europe respectively on trafficking, remind us that there are millions of children and young people bound to some form of slavery today.

These may however appear to be rather slight criticisms of what is, in the round, an important venture into a difficult terrain. One should not dismiss the difficulties in obtaining accounts of children’s lives (a problem not limited to the domain of slavery) and particularly accounts shaped substantially by children themselves; it is only in the last half century that campaigns to establish children’s rights and give them an autonomous voice really acquired significance. Much of the material in the book is thus indirect, often reaching us through the voice of significant others, and indeed two chapters hardly talk about children at all, one for example focusing on parenting issues. The book is consequently very uneven; one chapter is extremely short (albeit extensively referenced), another somewhat dated. Indeed the authors must have become quite impatient to see the publication appear: it is dated 2009 and some chapters were clearly finalized somewhat before that date. However, where children’s voices are heard (even if the voices of adults reminiscing many years later about their childhoods), they are further very powerful testimony to the appalling treatment of human beings as commodities, a treatment remaining as an indelible blot on the landscape of human rights.

The scope of the chapters is very wide. Some deal broadly with the experience of children, traded in the antebellum United States, in the early North Atlantic slave trade, the Indian Ocean (about which we know rather less than of some geographies of slavery), and in late eighteenth-century France. Others are much more specific, either in terms of geography (for example, chapters on Hong Kong, the Chesapeake, and the Sudan) or in discussing specific manifestations of child slavery, such as the Ottoman conscription of children, the use of female domestic servants (mui tsai) in China, and Korean palace eunuchs. Together they represent a generally scholarly if uneven account of aspects of child slavery spanning a period of 1,000 years.

The editorial tells us that this is one of two companion volumes, the second of which examines child slavery in the past 100 years to the present. This is an area which is now much more fully recorded through the activities of international organizations attempting to ensure that legal conventions banning slavery are upheld and of scholars (see for example my own edited collection Child Slavery Now). This book, however, begins to lay bare the huge task now facing scholars of slavery in the arena of child slavery. Paradoxically, the extensive references in each chapter may provide many starting points for this enterprise.