From protest at Yarl's Wood Detention Centre. iDJ Photography/flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
To better understand present-day efforts to end ‘human trafficking’ or ‘modern-day slavery’ we need to examine the first restrictions on human mobility, instituted following the abolition of the slave trade and slave labour relations in the nineteenth century. Like today’s anti-trafficking policies, this initial organisation of border controls centred on a narrative of ‘rescue and protection’ in order to normalise the regulation of people’s immigration. However, far from protecting anyone, these restrictions created the racialised and gendered image of the ‘immigrant’ whose entry and stay in a country’s territory was, and still is, to be controlled and exploited.
Imperial and nation-state logics on human mobility
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, both imperial states and states attempting to nationalise their sovereignty enacted different restrictions on human mobility, albeit for different reasons. Imperial states ruled by making those subjected to their powers of taxation, levies, and forced labour into their subjects. The more subjects the state had within its territories, the more people whose labour it could exploit, the more wealth it could amass, and the more power it could wield. Imperial states thus facilitated the movement of people into and across their empires. Indeed, they were actively involved in such movements, often on a massive scale, even as they then immobilised most people through labour relations of unfreedom. European empires, since the late fifteenth century, actively engaged in moving people through systems of slavery, debt bondage, penal transport, servitude, and, in late imperialism, nascent immigration regimes.
