Human trafficking is an expanding global problem that afflicts many regions of the world. The International Organization for Migration, for example, has found that the traffic in humans increases steadily each year, with women and children counting among the majority of those who fall victim to it. In light of this ever-changing and growing global problem, Trafficking in slavery's wake provides much-needed historical context and conceptualization of the problem of trafficking, with specific attention to its impact on the continent of Africa. What constitutes trafficking? What are the structural limitations of legal regimes and states trying to combat human trafficking? And what are the possibilities and solutions? This edited collection, which contains eleven chapters, an introduction, and an afterword, tackles each of these large questions to varying degrees. The result is a highly readable, richly researched, and interdisciplinary set of chapters, appropriate for college students and policy-makers alike.
The term ‘trafficking’, as a practice with a history, is deployed differently throughout the book. In the introduction, the editors explain that the volume explores the ‘changing modalities of the traffic in women and children’ (p. 2), and encompasses a spectrum of practices ranging from legal enslavement to illegal smuggling and trafficking of persons in the contemporary period. This liberal usage of the term ‘traffic’ implicitly argues that slavery and modern trafficking are connected, not only as a practice that changes over time but also in terms of sociocultural and political impact.
While each chapter addresses a particular question or context, there are certain broad arguments in common. The largest and most fundamental of these is that trafficking is not new, but rather has changed over time and has a long history (the precise nature of which is up for debate – more on this below). Another is that, in parallel with the decline in slavery on the African continent through abolition by colonial legal regimes over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the traffic in persons rose. Finally, it is clear that consent is at the heart of any discussion of trafficking – identifying consent, establishing the legal possibility of consent, and the harsh realities of constrained decision-making.
The book is organized chronologically, with the chapters falling into one of two parts: ‘Trafficking in colonial Africa’ and ‘Contemporary anti-trafficking in Africa and beyond’. This organization throws into sharp relief certain debates within the book. For example, while all of the contributors agree that trafficking is not a new phenomenon, even though global attention to trafficking has emerged only since the late 1980s, the authors do not entirely agree on its origins. Most of the contributors, particularly those whose chapters are contained within the first part of the book, see a direct connection between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of enslavement in Africa and trafficking. However, Jean Allain argues in his chapter that there is not a genealogical link, in the legal sense, between African slavery and trafficking. He is referring here to the rise in so-called ‘white slavery’ and trafficking in persons as defined by the International Convention for the Suppression of White Traffic in 1910. Beyond this point, there is little outright disagreement or debate among the chapters. Rather, the majority of the chapters emphasize the existence of a continuum of oppression of violence that existed within colonial and postcolonial contexts, upon which we can plot enslavement, kidnapping, coercion, fostering, and contemporary trafficking.
Conceptually, Trafficking in slavery's wake performs some very important work. Virtually all of the chapters argue that one reason why trafficking persists in Africa is that, from the time of the slave trade, formal institutions have tacitly supported traffic in people because, inter alia, this traffic undergirds many of the same hierarchies which support states and formal economies. Organizations that work to end trafficking, especially in the modern era, are often hobbled in their efforts since tackling the problem of demand for trafficked persons means up-ending power dynamics and implementing sweeping reform. Furthermore, organizations against trafficking face the challenge of applying universal and standardized language to local dynamics on the ground. In all these contexts, authors are broadly of the view that the best possibilities for significant and enduring change may lie with single individuals and small groups.
A great strength of Trafficking in slavery's wake is that it deconstructs categories and historicizes processes while also suggesting solutions to the problem of human trafficking. Lawrance, in particular, calls upon policy-makers to focus their attention on eradicating demand for trafficked persons. More to the point, the historical emphasis on criminalizing the traffickers – an issue that arises to differing extents in many of the individual chapters – has failed to curtail trafficking. This buttresses the editors’ contention that present-day policy-makers would do well to learn the history of trafficking as they seek to identify solutions to the problem of demand. This, however, is easier said than done, though many of the contributors argue that institutions have failed to operate in meaningful ways on the ground, sometimes because of weaknesses of the state, sometimes because of top-heavy approaches. One can only hope that scholarly interventions such as Trafficking in slavery's wake will work towards mitigating human vulnerability and exploitation.
