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Slavery

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, for initiating this debate on this very important subject. Having said that, I do not think that slavery exists in the modern world. I do not mean that there are not rampant forms of exploitation and oppression, which are found in all societies, including western countries. I want to make a conceptual point, but I hope it is not purely academic, because important policy implications flow from it. Slavery has existed throughout human history. In Aristotle’s Politics, which is the first account of how to create an organised society or state, the relationship between master and slave is described as one of the three core pillars of any organised society. In all traditional cultures until the 18th or 19th century slavery was everywhere regarded as a natural human condition. There were many slave revolts, of course, but ethical and economic objections to slavery came very late. I was glad that the noble Earl mentioned the trans-Atlantic slave trade because that was one of the greatest stains on western civilisation, but it was also a major lever for transformation. The slave trade energised a movement for change and the abolition of slavery that eventually became a global movement. In my view, the term ““slavery”” should be restricted to what some people call ““chattel slavery””. That is what slavery always meant. It was an institutionalised and legal part of society; slaves were normally expensive to buy and usually yielded only low profits for their owners. In the deep South of America in the 19th Century, for example, the average cost of a slave was $40,000 in today’s terms. Slaves also normally had a long-term relationship with their owners, because they were expensive property. Slavery in this sense—or something close to it—continues to exist in the modern world. We have only to think of the notorious case of Niger, which made slave ownership punishable in law as late as 2003. Of course, that law did not eliminate the practice completely. Similar instances exist in Chad, Mali, Mauritania and elsewhere. But when we turn to what people now call slavery, it means something different. We have to tease out these differences if we are to have adequate policies to confront the various forms of deprivation and exploitation that exist across the world today. For me, the debate about slavery has been shaped by one very important book: Kevin Bales’s Disposable People. That book was indeed a brilliant intervention in the global debate about slavery. He rightly separates what the calls the ““old slavery””—traditional slavery throughout history as I have described it—from the ““new slavery””. He estimates that there are 27 million new slaves in the world today. Bales is the head of an NGO, Free the Slaves. The work of Anti-Slavery International, which describes itself as the world’s oldest international human rights organisation, has also been cited. In no sense do I mean to criticise the work of those agencies, which all do excellent work. However, I do want to argue about the nature of slavery itself. If we do not abandon the term, we should at least be cautious about using it. I want to suggest three reasons for caution and, if I may be forgiven for being academic, three policy conclusions which stem from those. First, if we continue to call the various things mentioned by the noble Earl in his opening speech ““slavery””, we risk suggesting that history is continuous—that slavery has always been with us and therefore always will be with us. In the same sense, one could argue that poverty has always been with us; but this is not true. The movement against the global slave trade had enormous, transformative impact on the world. It served to eliminate almost completely the form of slavery which had existed for so many centuries. What we have therefore is an historical break. The kinds of exploitation that exist in the world are mostly only remotely connected with what used to be quite rightly called slavery. Secondly, as Bales points out, both the nature and origins of the so-called new slavery are utterly different from the past. No-one owns the so-called new slaves, whereas ownership was always the principle of what slavery meant. Today, slaves cost next to nothing; Bales estimates an average of $100 to pay for the vast category of people included under the notion of slaves. As the title of his book suggests, they are disposable. That is very different from the past. Thirdly, and most importantly, if we use the term slavery to cover such a wide range of circumstances that in fact differ from one another, we do not necessarily pick up the differences between their causes and how we should respond to them. For example, bonded labour—which, as was mentioned, is a big problem across large parts of the world—has nothing really in common with the sexual exploitation of children, early or forced marriage, or many of the other categories included under that loose notion of slavery. We have to prise them apart if we are to have adequate policies to deal with them. I conclude by mentioning what three of these policy orientations might do. First, as an academic, I would say that a lot more research and precision is needed in the debate about global slavery. To say that there are 27 million slaves in the world is meaningless, given the diffuse and highly emotional nature of the term. I looked through a lot of literature before this debate, and there are wildly divergent figures bandied around. Tracing those figures to their origins, in most cases I could not find the evidential basis for them. We are told that millions of people are involved in human trafficking and so on, but it is very hard to find the evidential base for those claims. We need more research of the kind carried out in Niger by Timidria, a local NGO group. It interviewed 14,000 people and was able to give a good account of what slavery means and the kind of exploitation that exists on the ground. We need more of that kind of research. Secondly, we should separate out those cases where the issue is a lack of modernisation from those cases which are the result of the outcome of modernisation and globalisation, which are very different. For example, bonded labour has existed for centuries. It existed alongside, but was different from, traditional slavery. In this area we need education, a change of family structures and direct intervention from the local state. Compare that with human trafficking, which is largely, but not entirely, a creation of the globalised world in which we live and the rapid means of communication which exist within it. Here we need something quite different—strong international action and collaboration. Thirdly, and finally, as we have only seven minutes—oh! I am there—there has been much discussion about what could be done in the West by individuals to contest these forms of exploitation, whether or not you call them slavery. Some suggestions—such as looking at the nature of pension funds—make good sense, but a great deal of what now passes for slavery is organised through the state. Some states play a direct role in the persistency of these practices—for example, Burma and Sudan—and other states are complicit in them. After the Iraq war, many liberals and people on the Left suddenly have rediscovered sovereignty. But human rights must take precedence over sovereignty in the world. We therefore must be prepared to be interventionist and for states and international organisations to be much firmer than they have been hitherto in contesting these forms of oppression.