The Palgrave Handbook Of Global Slavery Throughout History

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.

This handbook takes a comprehensive approach to studying and understanding modern slavery, particularly forced labour and human trafficking. It considers the historical and cultural roots of modern slavery and suggests that analyzing the issue from humanities, social sciences, criminological, and business perspectives could lead to a better understanding of its emergence worldwide. The handbook also highlights the role of religions/spiritualities and multinational corporations in the expansion of modern slavery and argues that exploring their potential ethical responsibilities is essential. Furthermore, it combines theoretical frameworks of intersectionality and globalization to study the interconnectedness of various factors in shaping and understanding modern slavery. Finally, it contains an impressive range of geographic and conceptual approaches to the problems of combating modern slavery.

In the West, human bondage remains synonymous with the Atlantic slave trade. But large slave systems in Africa and Asia predated, co-existed, and overlapped with the Atlantic system—and have persisted in modified forms well into the twenty-first century, posing major threats to political and economic stability within those regions and worldwide. This handbook examines the deep historical roots of unfree labour in Africa and Asia along with its contemporary manifestations. It takes an innovative longue durée perspective in order to link the local and global, the past and present. Contributors trace shifting forms of forced labour in the region since circa 1800, connecting punctual shocks such as environmental crisis, conflict, market instability, and crop failure to human security threats such as impoverishment, violence, migration, kidnapping, and enslavement. Together, these chapters illuminate the historical and contemporary dimensions of bondage in Africa and Asia, with important implications for the fight against modern-day bondage and human trafficking.

This handbook is an international, comprehensive, reference tool in the field of trafficking in people and slavery. It covers everything from historical perspectives to cutting-edge topics to provide a high-level and systematic examination of the field which is at the forefront of both research and practice. It has an impressive breadth of entries from leading experts and international organisations to NGOs on the ground. This handbook is truly global with contributions from scholars and practitioners on virtually every continent (e.g. Europe, North America, Australia, Africa, Asia, and South America). This book also covers problematic areas that cannot be found in other reference works. The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking is divided into eight key sections: 1. History of Slavery and Trafficking in Persons 2. Explanations and Methods of Inquiry 3. Types of Trafficking in Persons 4. Trafficking in Persons and Response Mechanisms 5. Organizational Profiles 6. Country, Region and Local Response Mechanisms 7. The work of Non-Governmental Organizations 8. Future Issues and Directions in Controlling Trafficking in Persons.

Leading social scientists and historians debate key controversies in the field of modern slavery and human trafficking studies.

This thought-provoking collection brings together academics from a range of disciplines to examine modern slavery. It illustrates how different disciplinary positions, methodologies and perspectives form and clash together through a kaleidoscopic view and forms a unique insight into critical modern slavery studies. Providing a platform to critique the legal, ideological and political responses to the issue, experts interrogate the construct of modern slavery and the anti-trafficking discourse which have dominated contemporary responses to and understandings of exploitation.

This Element shows that existing models of global slavery derived from sociology and modelled closely on antebellum American slavery being normative should be replaced a global slavery that is less American and more global. It argues that we can understand the global history of slavery if we connect it more closely to another important world institution – empires in ways that historicise the study of history as an institution with a history that changes over time and space. Moreover, we can learn from scholars of modern slavery and use more than we do the enormous proliferation of usable sources about the lives, experiences and thoughts of the enslaved, from ancient to modern times, to make these voices of the enslaved crucial drivers of how we conceptualise and describe the varied kinds of global slavery in world history. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.