Refraction. GETaiwan NTU/Flickr. CC (by-nc)
Interest for slavery, the slave trade, and abolition has grown steadily since the 1990s, when UNESCO launched the Slave Routes Project in order to turn this past of violence and sufferance into a path to inter-cultural dialogue and collaboration. Historians, literary critics, feminist thinkers, political philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists have all deepened our understanding of the key role slavery played in different periods of human history, and in the making of Western modernity. Public awareness has broadened through museum exhibitions and commemorative initiatives, as well as through a rising concern for forms of human bondage and exploitation that continue to thrive today.
Emotionally and politically charged, the issue of ‘modern slavery’ has, over the past three decades, prompted a discussion on the present importance of past slave systems and the slave trade, and the historical roots of contemporary world inequalities. Everybody agrees on the need to explore these interconnections, but how to do it is a different issue entirely.
