Over a century and a half after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, millions remain in bondage—children forced to take part in armed conflict or sold to brothels by their destitute families, men and women who toil for little or no pay, who are threatened and beaten if they try to escape.
Thus begins Barack Obama’s presidential proclamation inaugurating the 2014 National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. It couches a humanitarian anti-trafficking appeal in the familiar terms of an anti-slavery struggle that—it is often said—continues to be waged. We see this suggestion in many contemporary campaigns to end human trafficking. Organisations such as New York’s New Abolitionists, Free the Slaves, and Anti-Slavery International portray themselves as carrying forward the crusade begun by the abolitionists who spoke out against the transatlantic slave trade. However, their educational campaigns often take up the mantle of ‘new abolitionism’ without addressing the mixed legacies of the abolitionism that they invoke. Furthermore, their efforts to raise public awareness often focus on the journey into trafficking and slavery, yet overlook the weight of the legal and social edifices built by modern states to curtail and prevent escape.
Mobility was central to political struggles against African chattel slavery and the indentured or bonded Asian ‘coolie’ labour used to supplement and replace it in the Atlantic economy. Slavery demanded the regulation of movement. Disciplinary control over black bodies in space was essential to the theory of mastery. “At the heart of the process of enslavement was a spatial impulse: to locate bondpeople in plantation space and to control, indeed to determine, their movements and activities,” writes the historian Stephanie Camp. Slave states restricted mobility in part through the use of passes and residency licenses that declared the bearer either property of someone else or freed (manumitted) resident of the state. Coastal slave states went even further by enacting Negro Seamen Acts. These prohibited the entry of free black sailors and quarantined them in local prisons for as long as their vessels remained in port (and under threat of enslavement if prison fees went unpaid).
