In late 2015, the world's attention was drawn to Operation Underground Railroad, a transnational initiative to eradicate child trafficking whose celebrity collaboration made it a trending topic on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. While the organization's name was intended to emphasize the horrors of contemporary trafficking, it also inadvertently demonstrates the ways in which black slavery in the United States has come to serve as an emblem of all human bondage. Envisioning today’s trafficking as part of North American chattel slavery creates equivalences that frequently accentuate the racism of earlier forms of bondage and today’s trafficking without adequately grappling with capitalism's indisputable role in generating hierarchies that perpetuate inequality.

In this essay, I examine analogies of chattel slavery used to frame discussions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century human trafficking. Exploring conceptualizations of slavery in the Iberian Atlantic from the nineteenth century to the present, this essay deflects an exclusive focus on the United States and on race as defining factors in a global process of economic domination that encompasses race, gender, and national identity. I illuminate what Charles Mills has termed a problematic of personhood in which both globalized industrialization and chattel slavery are enmeshed.

The African slave trade charted new territory in fusing racist ideologies and economic principles in unanticipated ways that continue to bear upon commercial and human relations. Chattel slavery's intimate history with global industrialization makes visible the importance of the economy in determining the individual and delimiting his/her attendant rights. While race was a fundamental element of slavery, so were its economic underpinnings as it operated to sustain plantation-based economies in the Americas.

Myriad studies have explored slavery from the nineteenth century to the present. Yet many of these analyses examine the United States and its subsequent history of Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement, universalizing this history despite its uniqueness as it only occurred in one particular nation. The existence of an abundance of scholarship about bondage in the Anglo-Atlantic and, specifically, the United States further focuses the discourse that circulates around chattel slavery on racism. While astute studies have pointed out the entanglement of capitalism and slavery, racism frequently prevails as the impetus behind the global oppression of Africans in the diaspora rather than commercial practices predicated upon human degradation.