In his afterword, Ambassador Luis C. deBaca, whose career has encompassed policy, law, and scholarship around contemporary slavery in the United States and globally, acknowledges that this book is not only about fighting modern slavery and human trafficking but also about fights about modern slavery and human trafficking. It is concerned not only with what works in fighting modern slavery but also whether “modern slavery” and “human trafficking” are even the right ways to frame the fight against human exploitation today. These are crucial questions for researchers, policy makers, and activists, and both are thoughtfully explored by the interdisciplinary writers assembled in this edited collection, whose work is drawn together through their involvement in the Gilder Lehrman Center’s Modern Slavery Working Group at Yale University.

According to the editors, there are three overarching controversies and one question at the heart of this book. Do modern slavery/antitrafficking efforts crowd out support for labor and migrant rights while patronizing “rescued” workers? Do modern slavery/human trafficking efforts mask inequalities in the global economy around race, gender, and wealth? Do contemporary abolitionists misuse history in their current antislavery efforts (pp. 4–5)? And on the basis of all this, are efforts to fight modern slavery working (p. 20)? Chapters 2–6 are largely focused on historical analogy questions, and chapters 7–10 more on “what works,” but all raise vital questions about the framing of modern slavery and point toward the importance of structural analyses of the causes of exploitation.

The question of “what works” is complicated throughout the book by salutary, nuanced discussions of the work that definitions, numbers, and analogies do. Some authors are outright dismissive of the terminology of modern slavery, “a phenomenon that is neither defined or recognised in international law,” according to Grace Pena Delgado (p. 120); this can create seemingly simple dichotomies between “forced’ and “free” individuals, undermining systemic analysis of exploitation (see Anna Mae Duane and Erica Meiners, p. 68). Yet others like Kevin Bales and Alison Gardner use the “modern slavery” epithet with ease and moral certainty (chap. 4), and Zoe Trodd, Andrea Nicholson and Lauren Eglen discuss the “modern enslavement” of forced marriage throughout chapter 10. The political work that numbers do, in terms of counting slaves and trafficked people, is helpfully surfaced in Gunther Peck’s study of the analogies drawn between historic slave counts and today’s Global Slavery Index, both of which serve(d) sociopolitical purposes in advocacy for resources and benefited bureaucratic state growth while collapsing different experiences of unfree labor into a single category of “slaves.” The political work of analogies is made crystal clear in the chapters on sex trafficking abolitionism in Mexico (Delgado) and the League of Nations (Jessica Pliley), demonstrating how analogies with the “white slave trade” of the nineteenth century reverberate in antitrafficking agendas that are focused on “white saviorism” and immigration restriction to this day. Ultimately, as Duane and Meiners show, the emancipation narrative in relation to nineteenth-century slavery presents a linear and progressive view of history that is not borne out by ongoing racialized oppression and incarceration in the United States. As Jessica Pliley notes (p. 99), we need to be aware that, although historical analogies may inspire contemporary activists, they should also be a warning about how narratives and policies aimed at “ending slavery” can lead to collateral damage for those who are to be “rescued.”

A common theme wending through most of these chapters is the need to pay more heed to the systemic factors that create the conditions of human exploitation—and indeed how antislavery actions might compound these factors. Colonialism, racism (past and present), capitalism, gender discrimination, and border politics are all in the sights of these contributors as underpinning causes. In such contexts, as Janie Chuang unpacks in chapter 9, border security concerns and the economic benefits to states of cheap migrant labor easily overwhelm the issue of migrant workers’ rights as states seek to manage contemporary migration. Not only that but the policies adopted to fight slavery and trafficking often end up strengthening these elements, with for example, “deportation controls in the Golden Triangle (of Central America) being cast as anti-trafficking efforts” (Delgado p. 139).

It is this global context of the interests of capital and states that makes the “what works” question so challenging. In their chapter, Kevin Bales and Alison Gardner suggest that “ethical consumerism” past and present has the potential to fight slavery. However, this idea is severely damaged by the social science research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) presented in chapter 7 by Elena Shih, Jennifer (JJ) Rosenbaum, and Penelope Kyritis, and chapter 8 by Genevieve LeBaron. Hotel chains training their staff to be “trafficking vigilantes” while failing to address gender-based violence experienced every day in the workplace (chap. 7) and in-depth empirical research with the “beneficiaries” of certified fair-trade schemes (chap. 8) reveal whitewashing at work in CSR. These voluntary policing schemes for the corporate world fail to challenge the structural inequities of capitalism while simultaneously declawing collective action for workers’ rights. In trying to identify “what works” in chapter 10, Trodd and coauthors remind us that too often the voices of those who are exploited are missing. Their own work, privileging the voices of forcibly married women in India, directs attention again to structures of poverty, gender discrimination, and educational deprivation as the bedrock of exploitation.

In his afterword, Luis C. deBaca recognizes the wealth of the scholarship in the chapters of the book, and revisiting the three controversies listed at the start suggests no short afterword can address them conclusively. As someone who has been a policy maker, a legal practitioner, and an ambassador in the field, however, he holds a pragmatic hope that slavery language can be a powerful tool to name and address injustices (p. 241), while acknowledging that critics see modern slavery as “a cloaking device for morality enforcement by the security state” (p. 239). In my reading, however, the balance of this book is toward those who do question whether modern slavery and human trafficking narratives and politics are undermining migrants’ rights and masking inequalities. With their historically grounded warnings about the politics of definitions, numbers, and analogies and their readings of the underpinnings of contemporary exploitation, the authors provide excellent analyses to enable readers to pick their side in the fight about human trafficking and develop insights into what is really needed in the fight against “modern slavery.”