L'Emancipation à La Réunion by Alphonse Garreau. Wikimedia Commons.
Une version étendue de l'article a aussi été publiée en français.
Slavery and related forms of servitude have been illegal for some time, but are nonetheless reported to be globally on the increase. It is not easy to make direct or straightforward comparisons between the problems of today and the transatlantic slave trade of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Such an exercise too often ends up in anachronism and errors of interpretation. What we can do, however, is reflect upon differences and similarities between patterns of political activism. In order to better understand today’s patterns we need to relate them to the long-term historical context of antislavery movements born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from which the international organisations and non-governmental organisations of the twentieth century originate. Instead of celebrating the past, we need to reflect on how and why slavery came to an end as a legal institution, the important yet too often neglected role of slaves and ex-slaves, and the practical limitations of what could ultimately be accomplished from European metropoles.
