The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (review)

Joel Quirk, Deputy Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, has written an ambitious new book, The Anti-Slavery Project. Quirk’s text argues that there is a much-overlooked continuity between the historical movement against slavery and the struggle against contemporary forms of human exploitation, such as indentured and bonded labor and human trafficking.

Quirk adopts a “big picture approach” that encapsulates several hundred years of history. The volume is divided into two distinct sections. The first portion of the volume focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth century struggle to abolish chattel slavery. The second section of the text discusses contemporary forms of human exploitation. The specialist reader on completing the book will find themselves asking for a more detailed explication, while the generalist may find that they are overwhelmed.

Quirk first focuses on the question of how slavery, which was once a natural feature of human society, came to be regarded as an unconscionable crime against humanity.

He does not recount the well-documented history of trans-Atlantic slavery and instead focuses on the United Kingdom and continental Europe, which he views as the crucial influences on the abolition of global slavery.

Quirk argues that the eradication of slavery in England primarily resulted from an acceptance that slavery was a “bounded category,” which was a unique form of suffering and maltreatment which was not an inevitable feature of society. He argues that the British people and politicians came to accept that slavery was at odds with English moral exceptionalism and superiority and that the abolition of slavery had very little to do with the embrace of human equality.

The belief that slavery was an affront to civilized values spread to other European countries, which followed England in embracing abolitionism. Anti-slavery became the touchstone of legitimacy for any European regime. According to Quirk, these colonial powers, despite the depredations visited upon their colonial territories, were responsible for promoting abolitionism in their foreign possessions.

Slavery by the early twentieth century, although legally prohibited across the globe, had morphed into other forms of exploitation. This development resulted from a conjunction of forces. Agriculturists and industrialists continued to demand inexpensive labor in order to maximize profit and former slaves continued to find themselves limited by the disabilities of money, education, caste, and race and had few alternatives.

The League of Nations 1926 Slavery Convention was restricted to chattel slavery. The treaty defined slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”¹ Signatory states were bound to “prevent and suppress the slave trade,” and to “bring about progressively and as soon as possible, the complete abolition of slavery in all of its forms.”² In the 1930s the League appointed a series of Expert Committees dominated by European powers with a mandate to document and to investigate the continued existence of chattel slavery. These reports generally focused on the remnants of slavery in Africa and relied on information from governments, most of whom claimed that slavery had been eradicated or only existed in small sectors of the country. The expert committees continued to define slavery as “powers attaching to the right of ownership” perpetuating the continued distinction between chattel slavery and other forms of human exploitation such as debt bondage and serfdom.

A new stage in the evolution of the anti-slavery movement was introduced by the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery.³ This document was intended to supplement the Slavery Convention. Article One of the Convention obligates states parties to take “all practicable and necessary legislative and other measures” to abolish and abandon four practices: debt bondage, serfdom, servile marriage, and the transfer and exploitation of child labor.⁴ The Convention categorizes individuals victimized by these practices as...