This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”

Chapter 2 takes a deeper dive into the literatures on pragmatism and agonism to illustrate how, when combined, they provide the intellectual framing and underpinnings of the varieties of remedy approach. While pragmatism highlights the need to analyze the dynamics between local actors, their advocates, and the firms involved in the abuse, agonism opens us to the notion that non-violent contestation and confrontation could have a potentially positive role. With this foundation, I develop the varieties of remedy approach, exploring how contestation (e.g. claim making) shapes governance outcomes (e.g. access to judicial or non-judicial remedy mechanisms). Three pathways are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 2 – Institutional Strength, Corporate Characteristics, and Elevating Voices – and tested empirically in subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines how free labor was adapted as a compelling argument in the antislavery Anglo-Atlantic. For English antislavery these strategies developed out of a need to show emancipation’s imperial commercial advantages, as parliamentary debates questioned whether former slaves would work upon emancipation. In the United States, free labor antislavery emerged from a burgeoning ideology that imbued labor with moral characteristics. Through the industriousness of black West Indians, abolitionists on either side of the Atlantic hoped to prove the moral rightness of emancipation, the capability of former slaves within democratic capitalism, and the benefits of free labor.

This speech reiterates and updates arguments Du Bois made in the 1915 “African Roots of War” (chapter 3): that colonialism is a continuation of the labor exploitation that began with ancient slavery and continued as the modern slave system sustained by racism, and that colonial rivalry among white states is the primary cause of war in the twentieth century. Du Bois laments the failure of the both the United Nations and organized labor to recognize and address this most urgent global crisis. He compares the United States and South Africa as two so-called democracies at the forefront of the movement to “re-enslave human labor” and condemn their Black members to disenfranchisement and poverty, and he links the long history of exploitation of African Americans to the United States’ extensive militarism and exploitation of colonial labor. The emancipation of Africa is the key to the emancipation of the world.