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Everybody agrees on the importance of bringing together the study of ‘old’ slave systems with research on the contemporary marginalities and exploitation that fall under the category of ‘modern’ or ‘new’ slavery. But how to do so is a different question entirely, since each step paves the way for disagreement. ‘Old’ and ‘modern’, for example, are in quotes because they are relative terms: north Atlantic slavery is ‘modern’ compared to that of Antiquity and the Mediterranean world; and the ‘modern’ and ‘new’ slaveries that anti-slavery organisations target are new in relation to the slave systems of the 18th and 19th centuries that abolition wiped out. Yet not all agree on this naming.
And controversies do not end here. Those who agree that ‘modern’ or ‘new’ refers to the slavery of our times, themselves split into two groups. Some argue that there exists a clear-cut division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery, and claim that we risk obscuring the significance of the former when we ‘blend’ it into the latter. Others, by contrast, remark that ‘old’ slavery only transmogrified after abolition – although legally it died, it was born again in many varieties of unfreedom that underpin today’s ‘modern’ slavery: social stigma, racial discrimination, restraints on political participation, economic marginality, and labour exploitation.
