Trafficking, Smuggling, and Illicit Migration in Gendered and Historical Perspective, c 1870-2000

Human trafficking, 'people smuggling' and clandestine migration are some of the most politically volatile and socially pressing issues in the present day, but they also have a long history. This project will contribute significantly to the emerging study of the history of illicit and clandestine migration by examining the history of trafficking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in comparative and global perspective. The PI, Julia Laite, a specialist on trafficking and migration in the British World, and the CI, Philippa Hetherington, a specialist on trafficking in the Russian empire, will collaborate to produce a comparative study of trafficking and clandestine migration in these two nations and empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while organizing a series of workshops and a major digital collaboration project that will bring together historians who are studying trafficking, smuggling and illicit migration in other areas of the world in the modern period. This digital collaboration will also produce a web-application, centred around an interactive mapping project, which will be collaboratively built by project participants based on their own research and expertise and shared widely with both academic and non-academic stakeholders.
The history of trafficking is transnational and multifactorial by its very nature: people moved across national borders, states responded to trafficking at national and international levels, and law enforcement operations communicated across national jurisdictions and around empires. The comparative and collaborative nature of the project will enable us to explore a unique set of methodological questions. How can we write a collaborative global history of trafficking that also captures complex national, local, and individual factors? How can we develop lasting and usable collaborations between those who research the history of trafficking around the globe? How can we digitally represent the complexity and changing story of modern trafficking and illicit migration?
We will seek to entangle concepts and experiences of trafficking. Rather than seeking to clarify trafficking and smuggling as normative or legal categories, we will instead question the utility of separating 'trafficking,' 'smuggling', and 'illicit migration' as unique experiences of migration and specific targets for crime or migration control. Secondly, we will examine trafficking in the context of the history of international crime and wider migration control. We will ask, how does trafficking policy relate to migration control more broadly, and how has it influenced the development of migration law and enforcement? Thirdly, we will explore the connections between gender, sex, labour, and illicit migration, both in terms of law and policy, but also in terms of individual people's experiences in the past.
This proposed research project will make a significant contribution to existing scholarship and improve insights and understandings of the history of trafficking and smuggling in several ways. The work will examine not only discourses about trafficking but the operation of law enforcement and the experiences of trafficked persons and their traffickers, and will move beyond the existing scholarship which focuses overwhelmingly on international campaigns against trafficking. Through its planned international network and collaborative digital project, the proposed research program will build on and facilitate the work of other emerging scholars, and share this work with a broad academic audience and with non-academic beneficiaries. It will help to build a global history of trafficking, at a time when historical perspective is critically needed to improve understanding of the phenomenon in the present day.

This project is explicitly designed to be of benefit to non-academic stakeholders and beneficiaries, and to have an impact on their understanding, policies and practises. These include, firstly, policy makers, politicians, and the media. Trafficking and smuggling are pressing contemporary global problems, however, many presentations of trafficking and smuggling are superficial, short-sighted, exaggerated, or anecdotal. Journalists, social workers, enforcement officers, lawyers, and NGO practitioners working at the front lines of trafficking and smuggling are afforded little opportunity to reflect on longer-term trends and experiences. Our research will complicate popular understandings of trafficking, and provide a longitudinal study of policy impacts, demonstrating the effect of past policies and laws upon trafficking victims, illicit migrants, and criminal networks. As a result policy makers and organizations will be in a better position to develop policies and interventions which are enforceable and do not further harm or marginalize victims.
Secondly, our research will engage with teachers and students in secondary education. As evidenced by schools and museums projects on the history of slavery and abolition, there is a desire and need to bring the history of trafficking and smuggling into the classroom. This can help fulfil the aim to include 'at least one significant issue in world history' in the modern period in Key Stage 3 of the history national curriculum. The interactive map will provide educators with a very engaging way to get students to explore the history of clandestine migration and its control, and fulfil the aims of the National Curriculum to help students understand change and contrast in history and the nature of historical evidence.
Finally, our research could have an impact upon trafficked and smuggled persons and other clandestine migrants. These individuals are stripped of their agency by traffickers and smugglers, and are presented by the media as unthinking, helpless and 'invisible' victims, uprooted from their own countries illicit in the nations where they live. They are often therefore seen as 'without history' or a meaningful past. By illuminating the largely unexplored history of trafficked and smuggled persons' experiences through an open-access web resource, our project will provide trafficked people and illicit migrants with a way to conceptualize their own experiences collectively and historically.
In order to reach these groups, we will create an extensive digital resource and interactive web-app that will lie at the heart of our project. This web-based resource, which will include information sheets, teaching resources, and blog posts, will be open-access, mobile-friendly, and interactive. At the heart of the site will be a web-app that will take the form of an interactive and changing map of trafficking in the modern world. We will also run two events, which will help disseminate our research findings and web resources to stakeholders and potential beneficiaries, but will also be specifically designed to garner feedback from these groups in order to build the web resource according to their needs and practises. We have had expressions of interest in these events from the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner in the UK, the Border Agency, as well as affiliated social workers and barristers who are developing programmes to more effectively prosecute and prevent trafficking crime. We have also approached the Global Alliance against the Trafficking in Women (GAATW), an international NGO dedicated to addressing the problem of trafficking from a human rights perspective. The Historical Association has expressed interest in an event for students and educators. Identifying trafficked and smuggled persons will present a significant challenge. We will attempt to do so through key organizations and on social media, where many former trafficked people and their advocates are active.