Global Slavery and Human Trafficking

By Professor Henrice Altink

January 2022 is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month in the US. Many associate the term slavery with the system of labor in place in the US and other parts of the Americas from the early 17^th till the late 19^th century. During this period, some 12 million Africans were brought to the Americas and forced to work on plantations, in mines and in other fields. Human trafficking, on the other hand, is usually seen as a late 20th and early 21^st century phenomenon and often narrowly described as sex trafficking. The forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking series, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance, corrects this view, showing that systems of slavery and human trafficking have taken many forms and have been common across the globe from early human settlements to the present.

The fifth volume in the series, which I edit, covers the first half of the 20^th century. It is often assumed that this period witnessed a decline in slavery and human trafficking as the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery had been abolished and international treaties were adopted to combat unfree labour, including the 1926 Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery and the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. Yet during this period the number of enslaved people increased dramatically as colonialism matured, industrialising economies such as Japan look further afield for raw products and cheaper labour, and global wars led to new demands for forced labour.

Colonial labour practices

While more extreme forms of slavery and the slave trade were eradicated in colonies between 1900 and 1945, in part because of work undertaken by the League of Nations and the ILO, slavery and slave-like conditions continued in many colonies largely because colonial powers needed labour and feared instability (Campbell and Alpers 2005: 13). In fact, the period witnessed a greater range of unfree labor. For example, debt bondage was prevalent across parts of the world with men selling themselves or family members into slavery or forced labour to pay off debt resulting from such factors as high-interest rates, natural disasters, disease, and increased taxes, or simply to obtain credit, food, or tools (Campbell and Stanziani 2015: 5-7). This category included such varied practices as pawning – a system common in parts of Africa whereby a person, mostly a young girl, was given as a security for a debt and the creditor could use the girl for labor until the debt was paid off – and the Mui Tsai system – the use of young poor Chinese women as bonded domestic servants in China and other parts of the world.

Labour migration

The first half of the 20^th century was also marked by major migration streams. Many migrants had signed a contract for three to five years, such as thousands of Japanese contract laborers on sugar and pineapple plantations in Hawaii, Brazil, and Peru. Others moved without a contract but easily found work because of the increased commercialisation of cash crops, mineral assets, and other products around the world. Like contract laborers, they often encountered conditions akin to slavery, including excessive hours, physical coercion, and delayed payment and wage deductions for minor transgressions. The migration of contract and other laborers, especially from China and other parts of Asia to the Western hemisphere, along with increased colonisation also facilitated a rise in sex trafficking. In 1906, for instance, there were some 22,000 Japanese prostitutes overseas, mostly young girls from impoverished areas whose parents had sold or pawned them to someone and who in turn had sold them to a brothel (Warren 2014: 298) 

Other forms of unfree labour

But the period also witnessed a rise in unfree labour in Europe, especially during the Second World War (WWII).  Between 1939 and 1944, there were some 13.5 million foreign workers in Germany of which only 1.5 million had come voluntarily. In fact, during the last year of the War they made up half of the agricultural labour force and some 20 percent of the total German workforce (Drescher 2009: 430-1). But Germany was not the only nation that used forced labour during WWII. Japan submitted some 18 million people to forced labour, mostly Chinese (Drescher 2009: 450-1). The British and the French, furthermore, undertook large-scale civil conscription for wartime production in their African colonies. But this was nothing compared to the forced labour camps in the USSR better known as the Gulag. Initially only common criminals and kulaks – well-off peasants who opposed collectivization – were sent to the Gulag but soon also political prisoners and many others were sent. From some 200,000 in the early 1930s, the number of inmates increased some tenfold by the early1950s (Drescher 2009: 422).

Memorialising unfree labour

Although numbers are hard to estimate, more men and women were forced to build public infrastructure projects, undertake work that helped enrich private companies or were forced to give sexual services than those forcefully removed from Africa during the era of Atlantic slavery. Yet to date there are few memorials, markers, and museums to commemorate the use of slavery and forced labour between 1900 and 1945, largely because the system of slavery that was in place in the Americas from the 17^th till 19^th centuries has become the benchmark of slavery and the many forms of unfree labour in the first half of the 20th century do not correspond with this model. The growth of memoirs, oral histories, and other ergo-documents in recent years (e.g. Foundation ‘Remembrance, responsibility and future’ and UNESCO’s Slave Route Project), however, offers scholars an opportunity to honour the individual and collective memory of millions of enslaved labourers in the first half of the 20th century. 

Professor Henrice Altink's forthcoming book Bloomsbury Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking series, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance, will be out in 2022.