From the 1610s in London, servant brokers, merchants, and eventually justices of the peace and their clerks recorded consent to transatlantic colonial indentured servitude with heightened attention. In doing so, they were responding to the vastness of the distances servants crossed, compounded with the multi-year length of their contractual terms and the unlikeliness of the servants returning home. The assignability of these contracts further differentiated them from the contemporaneous forms of indentured labor. In this newer system, contracts more often specified the voluntary nature of servants’ agreement with a free will clause, precisely because their willingness seemed implausible. The treatment of different categories of recruits, including adults, children, convicts, and paupers, are compared. Unwilling recruits could sometimes secure their release before the ships departed England. Sealed indentures made escape far less achievable.

A framing case study discusses child workers in Bolivia. Then the chapter provides an overview of international human rights law. The chapter first discusses the historical origins of the human rights movement and the multilateral and regional human rights systems. Then it outlines major physical integrity rights, including laws that prohibit genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, and human trafficking. It next turns to major civil and political rights, including the right to free expression, assembly, and association, various religious protections, and criminal justice rights. Finally, it examines major economic, social, and cultural rights, including rules about labor, economic and social assistance, cultural rights, and the rights of marginalized groups, like women, children, and the disabled.

In this chapter, we provide context for Part II’s examination of religion and contemporary slavery, by sketching the evolution of slavery and the development of antislavery efforts from after the American Civil War until the late twentieth century. We discuss the antislavery movement focused on the Belgian Congo around the turn of the twentieth century, the League of Nations 1926 Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, the persistence of slavery in various European colonies, and the use of state-organized slave labor by Axis powers during World War II.

From the beginning of human history, slavery and religion have been linked. Slaves have been forced to serve religious hierarchies. Religious doctrine has often set out who might be enslaved and justified that slavery. Yet religious ideas and motivations also led people of faith to restrict the scope of slavery and ease the lives of slaves in ages past, and religious groups were at the center of the successful abolitionist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unknown to many, the tangled and varied connections between religion and slavery continue today. Religious groups play a vital role in the fight against contemporary slavery, yet religious identity is still being used to facilitate enslavement, in several ways and in many countries. In this Introduction, we sketch the structure of our book and then treat three preliminary questions: How bad was ancient slavery? How bad is modern slavery? And what do we mean by “slavery”?

This chapter examines the role of human rights law in tackling modern slavery and human trafficking. It begins with Article 4 ECHR, which expressly prohibits slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour. It considers how each of those concepts has been defined by the ECtHR, how the ECtHR expanded Article 4 ECHR to include human trafficking, and why this was contested. Having examined the conceptual ambit of Article 4 ECHR it then considers the obligations associated with that right. Finally, it looks at how the UK seeks to satisfy its obligations through the NRM and the MSA. In this regard we will see that amendments made by the NBA and the IMA have starkly exposed growing tensions over, and resistance to, human rights law where it gives rise to obligations to those that have crossed a State’s border. Overall, this chapter thus highlights fundamental differences between the direction of travel in domestic law as compared with the direction of travel on the international plane.

Human trafficking is an international problem that involves involuntary or forced labor. This can occur in a range of settings including sex work, agriculture, manufacturing, and hospitality. Patients may present in the gynecology office with sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, mental health conditions, poor health or neglect, substance use disorders, and injuries. Providers should be familiar with red flags for trafficking and screen patients appropriately. With a positive screen, the patient’s safety needs to be immediately assessed. Trafficking can be reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Providers should be aware of and follow local laws for reporting. Appropriate care should be provided to the patient based on presenting symptoms, including a history and physical exam, sexually transmitted infection testing, imaging, and mental health screenings as indicated. There are limited data regarding outcome of pregnancies in people who are trafficked. Care should be provided using trauma-informed principles.

This chapter discusses the prohibition of slavery, servitude, forced labor, and human trafficking under international human rights law. It covers the definitions, scope, and international control mechanisms related to these prohibitions. The chapter examines the legal frameworks and standards for combating these practices, the obligations of states to prevent and address them, and the role of international cooperation in eradicating them. It also highlights the challenges in implementing these standards and the importance of adopting comprehensive strategies to protect victims and ensure accountability for perpetrators.

The case study examines the construction of the Imperial Pacific casino in Saipan, a US commonwealth in the Western Pacific, by Chinese firms employing Chinese workers. The focus is on the serious labor abuses that transpired and the legal and other consequences faced by the companies as a result. The case sheds light on the structure and operations of these Chinese construction projects, including the layers of subcontracting and how efforts to maximize speed and minimize costs resulted in numerous violations of local laws. The case also examines what actions the abused Chinese workers on such projects may take to enforce their rights and address their mistreatment. The case study therefore provides a useful tool to consider the issues involved in hiring and supervising contractors, such as cost, contract provisions, subcontracting, monitoring, and liability. The case also provides a platform to explore what legal, advocacy, and other tools workers and their advocates can use when legal violations and labor abuses occur. Additionally, this case study provides a uniquely detailed account of the events that transpired in Saipan because the author served as a lawyer representing the abused workers in a lawsuit alleging that they were subjected to forced labor.

This chapter reviews the convergences that occur between human trafficking and illegal wildlife trade according to information and case studies reported in the literature, including academic and gray publications, as well as the authors’ personal knowledge and empirical research in this area. We outline human trafficking and illegal wildlife trade convergences in a variety of shapes across different landscapes, including taxa and wildlife products. The impetus for this study is to highlight (1) the extensive ways that human exploitation and wildlife exploitation are closely related, and (2) offer explanations for such crime convergences. The chapter proceeds with an explanation of various types of human trafficking and wildlife trafficking convergences, followed by a discussion of the theoretical conceptualization of links between the two criminal enterprises. We conclude by outlining future research directions and the implications of the convergence between human and wildlife exploitation.

This chapter illustrates how the United Kingdom’s distinctive understanding of sovereignty combined with New Labour’s vision of the United Kingdom’s place in the global economy to shape the government’s approach to human trafficking. Targeting trafficking for sexual exploitation, the government cracked down on migrant sex workers and domestic prostitution. It also associated labour trafficking with illegal working and cast society as a victim of exploitation along with individuals who had been trafficked. The chapter describes New Labour’s selective acceptance of European Union and Council of Europe antitrafficking instruments; it adopted those instruments that reinforced the United Kingdom’s borders while avoiding those that gave rights to victims of trafficking. By equating its action plan for tackling human trafficking with the abolition of the slave trade, the government elevated its antitrafficking policies to a moral crusade.

This chapter examines how women within the boundaries of the family and marriage became central to interwar Japan’s international relations. Scholars have argued that Japan’s politics, economy, and society shifted from liberalism and internationalism in the 1910s–1920s to conservatism and isolationism in the 1930s. While women’s history has been studied along the same lines, this chapter explores the continued reinterpretations of emerging ideals about gender, emphasizing the continuity and discontinuity of Japan’s modernity spanning those two decades. At the heart of those ideals were informal marital relationships – socialist and companionate marriages – introduced from Soviet Russia and the United States, and global concerns in the League of Nations about human trafficking involving prostitution and daughter adoption. Japanese intellectuals, social leaders, and diplomats continued to engage with reformist ideals to address women’s inequalities in marriage and the family. However, their appeals to progress redefined Japanese women in the preexisting family system and considered them to be promiscuous, reinforcing gendered burdens and sexual differences within Japan’s national contexts.

The UN’s human trafficking protocol is the linchpin of the global antislavery governance network. It drew on a series of early twentieth-century international treaties directed at the problem of ‘white slavery’ – European women being procured to work as prostitutes. Designed to accommodate disagreements over the relationship between prostitution and human trafficking, the protocol’s definition of human trafficking produced legal instability. The chapter traces the expansion of human trafficking policy from a state-centred focus on using the criminal law to target international sex traffickers to include an ensemble of private and public actors who advocate supply chain transparency legislation and bans on the importation goods made with forced labour. Concentrating on UN-related organisations and the US government, it investigates this shift and its implications for how unfree labour is governed. The chapter demonstrates how the legal assemblage of jurisdiction kept highly gendered governance strategies from clashing.

The European Union adopted region-wide binding legal norms and a multifaceted legal approach to human trafficking. This chapter explains that the EU has competence (legal authority or jurisdiction) over human trafficking because trafficking is seen as a crime that moves across borders. By contrast, the EU needs another source of competence to tackle forced labour in supply chains. These different sources of competence over different drivers of unfree labour resulted in a proliferation of gendered governance strategies. Pushed by the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, the EU incorporated the rights of trafficking victims. The chapter illustrates how victim’s rights were subsumed under the EU’s primary goal of hardening Member States’ borders against undesirable outsiders, exemplified by migrant sex workers. The EU also promoted a corporate sustainability due-diligence directive and a product ban targeting unfree labour in supply chains, thereby extending EU values beyond Member States’ borders.