No chains … but we must free the millions held as modern slaves
by Laura Anne Jones, The Conservative Woman:
WHEN you think of ‘slavery’, what springs to mind? Odds-on it will be the same as if you type the word into Google and search for images: the abomination of the transatlantic slave trade. This is not surprising. Slavery has been much in the headlines in recent weeks, with a statue to a slaver and philanthropist (an interesting oxymoron if ever there was one) in Bristol being pulled down and dumped in a canal surely one of the images of 2020.
But slavery is not a phenomenon of the 1500s to 1800s, nor was it limited to the transatlantic trade. In one form or another it has existed since civilisation began. For slavery to ‘succeed’, it requires economic surpluses and a high population density, and arguably it became widespread only with the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago. From Ancient Greece to the Old Testament and to the Shang Dynasty of China, slavery is part of our history. Slaves form part of many stories and films. The gladiators depicted in in films such as Gladiator and Spartacus were slaves by any other name. The latter film takes artistic licence in presenting elements of the Third Servile War, one of many slave rebellions documented in history. Vikings, Berbers – hence ‘Barbary Coast’ – even Britons and Welsh all took part in slave trades.
Slavery again reared its ugly head during World War Two, when the Nazi regime effectively enslaved millions in Europe, be they in work camps or elsewhere. Today, although it has been abolished in some forms, it is still with us. We call it ‘modern slavery’, but an image is harder to come up with. We do not have the reference points of manacled Africans or prisoners in rough cloth working a Roman farm. What we do sometimes have, however, is a picture of an articulated lorry and its container full of dead people.
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