Human trafficking is a juridical concept invented in the nineteenth century that reappeared in the late twentieth century. The concept was created amid discussions about policing of national borders and reflected panics concerning the ideal of feminine purity, when women were seen in the discourse of the time as needing protection. In this chapter we will show how discourse in support of combating human trafficking for sexual exploitation has used ideas about gender and raciality to justify policies to contain migration. The twentieth century was marked by conquests of women”s rights, and white women are no longer seen as being in need of protection as were those of the nineteenth century. However, attributes that are both accusatory and victimizing still weigh on non-white women, especially when they are involved in sex work across national borders. In these terms, there is no space for women understood as victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation to be able to affirm their labour demands based on their own understandings about what constitutes sex work, violence, and exploitation.

In this chapter, the subjection of the Israelites in Egypt and their later liberation from oppression is examined with extracts from the Hebrew Torah, and the Greek Septuagint. The vocabulary of servitude of both Hebrew and Greek is discussed through the account of Joseph’s service and disgrace in the house of Potiphar, followed by the suffering of the Israelites, the later descendants of Jacob. The oppression inflicted by the Egyptians and their pharaoh on the Israelites in Egypt is to be seen in their forced labour in making bricks and construction work. Liberation involved leaving the country together, under the leadership of Moses. A final section examines a few further literary texts dating from the Hellenistic and Roman periods that treat related Jewish subjects.

In the Lushai Hills, colonialism provided the infrastructure for the circulation of violence and disease that helped drive upland populations towards its own institutions. An overlooked age of warfare underwrote the destitution, poverty, dislocation, and sickness that invading colonial agents misrecognized as primitivism but that was, in fact, the results of their own cataclysmic disturbances. A focus on profound violence and disruption - rather than the celebration of continuity, cross-cultural interaction, and cultural resilience that often characterizes Indigenous-centred studies of colonial encounter - demonstrates that highlanders had to adapt and reinvent themselves within a particular colonial situation and its imposed constraints: brutality, heartache, disease, forced labour, sexual violence, hunger, and loss. At the same time, Mizos developed creative responses to, and confidently articulated critiques of, their invaders - forces that often found themselves dependent on upland know-how, hospitality, and labour. Far from passive victims, Mizos resisted colonialism and sought out ways to moderate its most profound effects. They adopted new trade goods not only to make their lives easier but also (as with the adoption of colourful synthetic materials for headdresses and jewellery) to make everyday life more beautiful amid the bleakness of fear, dispossession, and conflict.

The chapter begins with discussion of the definition of occupation, beginning of occupation, and the end of occupation. It then reviews the rights and duties of the occupying power under Hague Convention IV as customary law addressing public order and safety, security needs of the occupying power, amendment of domestic laws of occupied territory, prolonged occupation of territory and transformative occupation. The chapter then considers the use of lethal force in occupied territory, transfer of the ocupying powers population into occupied territory, deportation, detention and destruction of property. It then addresses the application of IHRL in military occupation and finally the analogous UN adminstration of territory.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter discusses the prohibition of slavery, servitude and forced labour as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. It also pays attention to human trafficking and exploitation. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

The EU has been reluctant to engage in the negotiations for a UN treaty on business and human rights because such a treaty would have an impact on the competitiveness of EU-based corporations in the global marketplace, in particular, vis-à-vis competitors from developing and emerging states. Bearing in mind these observations relating to the EU’s position in the ongoing treaty process, this chapter aims to assess whether the EU has been able to mitigate the effects on the competitiveness of EU-based corporations in its unilateral ‘business and human rights’ legislative initiatives. After assessing which initiatives have been prioritised by the European Commission, this chapter investigates to what extent competition from non-EU corporations – and, in particular, corporations from developing and emerging states – has been taken into account during the drafting process of these initiatives, and to what extent they have a regulatory impact on such corporations. This chapter also discusses private international law issues.

This chapter examines the social history of slavery in the early Ottoman Empire. Arguing that the range of forms of enslavement and forced labour practiced in the Ottoman Empire cannot be described by the current ‘universal’ definitions of slavery, this chapter looks at the role of slavery in Ottoman dynastic politics, the social history of military and administrative slavery, and the slavery of skilled workers as central to the economic production of the early modern urban centres of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter concludes with an examination of the legal categories that were applied to different forms of slavery and manumission, and presents to the reader to a range of primary and secondary sources for the research of slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

Chapter 8 examines the law governing the exploitation of people’s labour by fighting organizations. The chapter focuses on the international crimes of enslavement and forced labour in armed conflict, as well as the recruitment of children, with a focus on how prohibitions and crime definitions apply to the predatory exploitation of labour in the context of irregular warfare.

This chapter analyses the growing use of ethical certification schemes as a strategy to fight forced labor in the contemporary global economy. It draws on a large primary dataset from the Global Business of Forced Labour study, collected from 2016–2018, which sheds light into the business models of forced labor in the cocoa and tea industries as well as the effectiveness of ethical certification in combatting forced labor. Drawing on data that demonstrates that ethical certification schemes are failing to create worksites that are free from exploitation, I argue that ethical certification labelling is misleading consumers about the labor conditions involved in the goods they are buying. I explore the contradictions of selling "ethical" products that give the impression that goods have been made through labor standards that they are known to fall short of. I explore the challenge of modernizing historically successful strategies to combat slavery made-goods for use in the present.

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking have become a cause célèbre. Yet, large numbers of researchers, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies of the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to anti-slavery and anti-trafficking framings of the problems, and are skeptical of the "new abolitionist" movement. Why? In this Introduction, we explain how our edited book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements and scholarship head-on. We have assembled champions and sceptics of anti-slavery to explore the fissures and fault-lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders’ use of history are accurate and appropriate.

Chapter 9 appraises the use of Southeast Asian labour by the Japanese. Subjects discussed include forced labour, Japan’s policy of enslaving comfort women and the recruitment of workers for Japanese armed forces. Construction projects, including the Thailand-Burma railway, relied heavily on forced labour and took an enormous death toll among workers, both Southeast Asian and Allied prisoner.