edited by Laura Brace Julia O’Connell Davidson REVISITING SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY Towards a Critical Analysis Revisiting Slavery and Antislavery Laura Brace · Julia O’Connell Davidson Editors Revisiting Slavery and Antislavery Towards a Critical Analysis Editors Laura Brace Julia O’Connell Davidson School of History, Politics and International School of Sociology, Politics and International Relations Studies University of Leicester University of Bristol Leicester, UK Bristol, UK ISBN 978-3-319-90622-5 ISBN 978-3-319-90623-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90623-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942665 © Te Editor(s) (if applicable) and Te Author(s) 2018 Tis work is subject to copyright. 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Cover design: Fatima Jamadar Printed on acid-free paper Tis Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature Te registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements We are much indebted to the co-organizers, speakers and participants at the British Academy Landmark Conference, ‘Slaveries Old and New’, March 2014, which inspired this volume, in particular, Bridget Anderson, Karen Bravo, Nathaniel Coleman, Mark Johnson, Nicolas Lainez, Tommy Lott, Samuel Okyere, Srila Roy, Nandita Sharma, Charlotte Sussman, and Zoe Trodd, as well as to the British Academy for funding the conference. Many thanks are also due to Lucy James for her invaluable support, and to colleagues who so generously gave their time to reviewing the contributions and providing such helpful feedback. Julia O’Connell Davidson is grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Major Research Fellowship (MRF-2012-085), which made it possible for her to work on this edited volume. v Contents Part I Past 1 Slavery and the Revival of Anti-slavery Activism 3 Laura Brace and Julia O’Connell Davidson 2 Contextualizing Slavery’s Wrongness 35 Tommy Lott 3 Te Liberty of Naming 65 Mary Nyquist 4 Historicizing Freedom of Movement: Memory and Exile in Political Context 97 Charlotte Sussman 5 Immigration Restrictions and the Politics of Protection 123 Nandita Sharma vii viii Contents Part II Present 6 Prison Labour, Slavery, and the State 151 Genevieve LeBaron 7 From Victims of Trafcking to Freedom Fighters: Rethinking Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East 179 Mark Johnson 8 “Back Home, It Would Have Been Worse Anyway…”: Vietnamese Wives’ Perspectives on Teir ‘Arranged’ Marriages with Chinese Men 207 Caroline Grillot 9 Moral Economies and Child Labour in Artisanal Gold Mining in Ghana 231 Samuel Okyere Part III Revisiting the Politics of Antislavery 10 Abolitionist Anti-politics? Capitalism, Coercion and the Modern Anti-slavery Movement 263 Neil Howard 11 Empowering Women: Te Contradictions of Feminist Governance 281 Srila Roy 12 Abolition Terminable and Interminable 305 Jared Sexton Index 327 Notes on Contributors Laura Brace is Associate Professor in Political Teory at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research interests include the politics of prop- erty, self-ownership and the social, sexual and racial contracts, and the political thought of Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Hegel. She is author of two books, Te Politics of Property: Labour, Freedom and Belonging (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and Te Politics of Slavery (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and numerous articles and book chapters on the eighteenth century self, citizenship, Hegel, Wollstonecraft, wet nursing and migration. Caroline Grillot is a social anthropologist (Paris X-Nanterre University) and a sinologist (INALCO). Her research has mainly focused on social margins if China and Southeast Asia. She has obtained a joined Ph.D. in social anthropology from Macquarie University (Australia) and the Free University of Amsterdam (Te Netherlands). Her research topic concerned cross-border marriages between Vietnamese women and Chinese men in borderlands, a topic on which she had previously pub- lished a book (Volées, Envolées, Convolées, 2010). She has updated her earlier fndings on cross-border marriages with a comparative approach and additional feldwork in collaboration with Elena Barabantseva at ix x Notes on Contributors the University of Manchester (2016–2017). In 2017, she has started a new research project with the support of the Ecole Franҫaise d’Extreme Orient on Chinese transhumant beekeepers; a project she is now pursu- ing with the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies (France). Neil Howard is Prize Fellow in International Development at the University of Bath. His research focuses on the construction and gov- ernance of ‘unfree labour’. He combines ethnographic research with those defned as victims of trafcking, modern slavery and forced labour, and political anthropological work with the institutions seeking to ‘protect’ them. He is also Founding Editor of the Beyond Trafcking and Slavery platform publishing at openDemocracy.net. Research for this essay was funded by European Union Marie Curie Actions, and by the EUI’s Migration Policy Centre. He is grateful for this funding, and for the generous editorial assistance provided by this volume’s editors, as well as by Asha Amirali. Portions of the essay were previously published as media articles with Al-Jazeera and openDemocracy. Mark Johnson is Reader in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests and writing are focused broadly around the issues of gender/sexuality, landscape and material culture, move- ment and transnationalism. Recent research includes British Academy funded research (2016–2018) that investigates ordinary people’s aware- ness of and perceptions about the diferent sorts of surveillance they encounter during their travels and explores the connections between care and control in processes of watching and being watched. He was also principle investigator for the AHRC funded Curating Development project (2016–2018) that investigates Filipino migrants’ contributions to development in the Philippines and co-investigator on previous AHRC funded research on the place of religion in the experiences of Filipino migrant workers in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia in par- ticular. Genevieve LeBaron is Professor of Politics at the University of Shefeld. She is also Co-Chair of Yale University’s Modern Slavery Working Group and a UK ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow (2016–2019). Her current research focuses on the global business of Notes on Contributors xi forced labour and the politics and efectiveness of governance initia- tives to combat it. She has held visiting positions at Yale University, the International Labour Organization, and the University of California, Berkeley and has published in some of the world’s leading politi- cal science journals, including Regulation & Governance, Review of International Studies, and Review of International Political Economy. Tommy Lott is Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University. He is editor of Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy (1998), co-editor with John Pittman of Blackwell’s Companion to African–American Philosophy, and author of Like Rum in the Punch: Alain Locke and the Teory of African American Culture, as well as numerous articles. Mary Nyquist is Professor at the University of Toronto, where she teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Department of English and the Literature and Critical Teory Program. Her research centres on intersections among early modern and enlightenment lit- erature, Euro-colonialism, law and political philosophy. Awarded the Milton Society’s title of “Honored Scholar” in 2011 (an achievement award not confned to Milton studies), she recently published Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago University Press, 2013). She is currently at work on a number of pro- jects that explore the semantic complexity and ideological import of interrelations among ‘freedom’, ‘slavery’ and ‘tyranny’. Julia O’Connell Davidson is Professor of Social Research in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She has researched and written on employment relations, prostitution, ‘trafcking’, childhood and recently held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project on ‘modern slavery’. She is author