"Negating Humanity": Modern Slavery in its Historical Context and its Implications for Policy

It is a frightening illustration of our times that it costs on average price an estimated $100 to buy a person. In the US in 1860, a slave cost $1,000 - some $20,000 today. By almost any indicator it would appear that slavery is thriving today, and not simply in developing nations. The issue is certainly exciting more attention. After nearly a century since the British Empire banned slavery, and for almost a century since the League of Nations re-iterated that ban, international bodies have attempted to define and outlaw slavery. Yet it persists. Over the last five years both Britain and the US have passed legislation and introduced far more stringent policing.
However, some would argue that its persistence is in some measure a question of definition. Slavery has never been simple to define, but what is certain is that "Modern Slavery" is not the old -fashioned "chattel" slavery exemplified in the ancient world or the New World. Far from it. The UK's 2015 Modern Slavery Act includes within its remit prohibitions on organ and embryo harvesting; forced marriage and debt bondage. Others see it as a question of enforcement, intrinsically linking slavery with globalisation and insufficiently restrained capitalism. They would argue that at their most extreme these forces encourage and excuse many forms of slavery, by essentially normalising them.
This study aims to examine both of these problems. The research of the Principle Investigator addresses issues of definition by examining the forces that drove, the effects of, and the implications of, what was arguably the first "Modern Slavery" legislation in the US: the 1910 White Slave, or Mann Act. On the surface it expanded US slavery beyond its usual racially proscribed boundaries, and seemed to take the idealism within the Thirteenth Amendment to new levels. Even so it has been considered notoriously unsuccessful in checking the enslavement of the young girls it sought to free, misogynistic and - ironically - inherently racist. Nevertheless, it remained the main source of legislation in the field until the 21st century.
Co-Investigator's work looks at the implications of the UK's 2015 Modern Slavery Act. This legislation criminalises a range of dehumanising, degrading and cruel practices under the remit of what it terms "slavery". It is this breadth of conceptualisation that has been seen as its weakness and it is that which this study seeks to examine. The project will establish how the Act has been enforced - what crimes it has focused on, as well as where its emphasis is taking the debate.
While these two studies compliment each other, the project has other objectives as well. The Project Partner in this bid shows its more practical stress. Paul Broadbent is the CEO of the Gangmasters Licensing Agency. His post was created in the wake of the 2004 Morecambe Bay disaster and he is charged with regulating and investigating the exploitation of workers in the food industry. Its remit is to be expanded to industry in general. As such he is centrally involved with the themes of this project - policy definition, public perception and efficacy of modern slavery legislation.
Funding will pay for two workshops and the establishment of a long-term network of journalists, leading policy makers, law enforcers and scholars who will collaborate through this project, as well as the research of the investigators. Themed on definition and public perception, these workshops will discuss and address such elements as the enslavement of the homeless in present day London and the use of AI in tracking labour supply chains in the US. Aiming to remain active after this project, members will use other networks to amplify their message, improve its connections and as a platform for conferences, web presence and publishing opportunities. The project aims to produce an edited volume with CUP, two peer-reviewed articles and a panel for the Historians Against Slavery's first conference in October 2017.

While very much a pilot project, this investigation has the potential to achieve a broad public impact by involving a deliberately wide range of participants and practitioners from outside academic who are grappling with similar and related questions. However, at present these scholars, policy makers, enforcers, commentators and advisors are speaking to different audiences on a subject which not only has huge scholarly interest, but is also exciting great public debate. It is the object of this study to create a variety of means by which the participants can not only discuss the issues at stake with each other, but also disseminate those ideas with a wider, more general, audience.

Those taking part in the project - both the two main researchers, and those participants in the workshops - have all been closely involved in putting this bid together and is in that spirit of collaborative effort that this project seeks to continue. It is the aim of this project to both draw on, and contribute to the knowledge and efficacy of those working at the highest levels of policy formation, as well as those who have had the misfortune to be the victims of modern slavery. With this in mind the panel that the group will put forward for the inaugural European conference of Historians Against Slavery in October 2017, will have the PI and CoI, the CEO of the Gangmaster Agency and Shamere McKenzie, a former victim of sex-trafficking from the US.

Although the workshops planned will be small, their impact will be magnified by the fact that attendees are linked with organisations that play important roles on both sides of the Atlantic. The Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center in Virginia and the national, Historians Against Slavery, are the two of the leading bodies in the USA connected with tracking trans-national criminal activity and academic efforts to publicise and stamp out modern slavery. Alongside these groups, in the UK this research will also be tied in with the AHRC funded, multi-centred, Antislavery Usable Past (ASUP) - one of the UK's leading interpreters of the historical importance of abolitionists of all types to the efforts to control modern slavery.

In addition the project is developing connections with the more focused policy-facing group History and Policy, based in Cambridge and Kings College, London. Contributing to this forum will hopefully, as Polly Toynbee claimed, make politicians "boast less about new ideas and their own successes" and pay more attention to the policy lessons in this field of the recent, and not so recent, past. This project will be affiliated with all three of the above bodies, enabling it to use their superior media presence to intensify the impact and appeal of this relatively small project. This amplification should also be enabled by the connections the group have with journalism. One of the participants in the workshops is a freelance journalist with experience of working with Channel Four, Radio Four, Radio Five Live and the BBC World Service.