It is just different ways of doing math. Thank you for that brilliant, moving, and site looking up a rigid keynote address. It is what this conference needed. You need not give any apologies for crunching the numbers. I know you are not apologizing. Do not get depressed. We will solve all these questions in the next session. There is coffee upstairs. We will take a 10 minute break. We want you back here in 15 minutes. Thank you very much. [applause] on like the ones to come that will be paddles, unlike the ones to come that will be panels, we will begin with a paper that we will make available. It should be on our web site. Then two respondents. Joel moved to south africa a year ago. He was a Deputy Director for the study of slavery and emancipation. At the opening conference, and i know brian davis is here today, he was there as well, david and i had the great privilege and for me a thrill to speak at that opening conference at the Global Affairs institute. At that conference, if none of you have been up to england, you should go. An extraordinary, victorian theyat has become have a wall of fame of abolitionists. Each bus speakers had to represent one of those abolitionists. I was frederick douglass. At any rate, it was one of the thrills of my recent life. Dole joel is the author of many books, including the anti slavery project from the slave trade to Human Trafficking. He is coeditor of slavery, identity, and memory. You do not sleep. Slavery, migration, and temper and contemporary bought it in africa. Slavery, migration, and contemporary slavery in my in africa. Joel on the crucial questions of defining slavery. Joel . [applause] i would like to start by taking this opportunity to thank you david and your team. Having spent 26 hours on the planet, i have to say that any problems arising out of this presentation can be attributed to just lie jet lag. What i want to say, starting this presentation, this is a paper that was commissioned specifically for this conference. While i worked on the area of definitions in the past, i felt obliged to write something new. That is never a good idea. The paper is cracking at the seams. I hope it speaks and advances some of the issues and complications we heard in the previous keynote. Before i get to the paper, i just want to Say Something about where i am coming from and where this fits in terms of Broader Research i have done. I have been working on a slavery for nearly 15 years. The primary motivating idea, the sport at the start was the idea that there were a lot of people talking about contemporary slavery. There are now a lot more people in the late 1990s. Now we have a lot more people. There are a lot of people who talk about the history of slavery and abolition. When i was beginning my work, there was an expectation or assumption these things were separate and independent fields of study. You have the history of slavery on one hand and a contemporary slavery on the other. What i had been doing over the course of my research is trying to explore and interrogate the various ways in which these two can beof scholarship integrated. Here in particular i have taken issue with the familiar but increasingly outmoded distinction between all slavery, by which we mean it transatlantic slavery, and new slavery, which is tied and assumed to be a distant phenomenon. I am trying to complicate and contest that particular viewpoint. I have tried to think about how the history of slavery can be used to inform and shape how we think about problems happening in our own time. I tried to think in particular of history as a strategic template that enables us to fight better and frame the language so we do not feel obligated to reinvent the wheel or not learned or try to learn from things that happened in the past. Second, i have tried to push on a number of fronts the idea of the history of slavery, while it is nice to think about it as a template for inspiration and instruction, in many cases, it is much of cause for caution and complication. There are a number of issues and events and trajectories associated with the legal abolition of slavery in which its limitations are central and fundamental to what is happening in our own times. In this paper, i want to think about two things the first is, i want to think about how we can define and conceptualize slavery as a category, and in thinking about that, i am particularly interested in how we deal with this for a recurring ambiguity which arises at points of intersection between the slavery and what i want to describe as other forms of human bondage. The problem should be familiar to most of us. Slavery has been legally abolished, yet we still have a bunch of problems that invite comparison to what we think about in terms of historical slavery. There is this impulse or instant that these are in some way related or connected or associated. At the same time, we have a lot of ambiguity surrounding this. In this presentation, i want to do a couple of things. The first thing i want to do is lay out a set of ideas and frameworks for how we might think about the problems associated with defining slavery and its relationship to things like debt bondage, Human Trafficking, child labor, and so on. I want to say, this is how we can begin to think about the interconnections between these things. Second, i want to offer some tentative solutions for how i feel we should think about these things. If the framework for describing the problem and a series of ted solutions the framework for describing the problem and a series of Texas Solutions of tentative solutions. When i was doing my power point presentation today, i was acutely aware of everything i left out in my paper. There are some suggest some suggestions and working out the back story about the conclusions i want to present. Some of it is hidden off stage. I invite you to press me on any issues i have not adequately covered. In thinking about slavery and human bondage, i want to suggest that there are three approaches that we need to think about when it comes to this issue. The first is strategic minimization, the idea that slavery can be restricted to an idea of true or genuine slavery. This idea of slavery should be held as separate and distinct from other categories. The second is what i call rhetorical inflation, the idea that slavery can be best employed as a strategic advice to draw attention to problems and agendas. Third, we have legal clarification, which is my preferred response wherein we have slavery and it is untried enshrined, and instead of defining slavery rhetorically, we should appreciate that over time we now have a number of complementary and auxiliary devices and strategies which enable us to speak about and come back and i guess things that look a bit like slavery that we may not want to define as such. I want to take you coast ticket through those three approaches briefly. In keeping with the type of work i do, i want to think briefly about how the historiography surrounding slavery and abolition could be used to better inform and shape how we might think about practices today. Strategic minimization up here, i have included a quote from the league of nations, which was unofficial report produced in the 1930s in order to describe an excuse and minimize certain practices that were associated with residual slave systems in colonial africa, india, and parts of asia. I put it up. I will not read it. It is emblematic of a broader trend which elevates slavery to this distant and a separate rarefy category. It sits at the apex of a hierarchy, and anything that falls short of an extremist an extremely demanding rigorous standard, it becomes something other than slavery. In some of variants, we have a mild slavery, vestiges of slavery, slavelike practices. Ever since slavery was abolished, and even prior to that, there has been this tendency to minimize and excuse certain problems that lot like slavery, but for various political reasons, people have tried to place in other categories. On the one hand, we had this minimalist conception of slavery, and it is not an objective it is tied up in agendas or orientations or assumptions that people make about what would be useful for slavery to look like. On the other hand, we have a rhetorical inflation rhetorical inflation is a tendency to equate or associated a very wide range of practices and problem areas as forms of slavery. Example i have used is a tendency in the United Nations where by the last 40 years since the late 1970s, the United Nations has been talking about the slaverylike populations of apartheid and colonialism. Here we have an exercise in rhetoric. The collective suffering, dominion, and exploitation of our broader population with forms of individualized suffering and dominion. There is a tendency to expand the boundaries of slavery, partly as an exercise in drawing attention to various problem areas, and partly as a sense that the abolition of slavery does not mean very much. If we legally abolished something, and the things we thought we were combating, the things we were hoping to eradicate aptly persist under various other guises actually persist under various other guises. Sometimes this works very well, sometimes it works very poorly. A problem that arises is that it has a tent is that it has a tap is that it has a tendency to model coherence. We have to go complications. To muddle coherence. We have to go complications. Slavery becomes a form of political tyranny. Slavery becomes all that is bad and problematic in this role. This world. We had a problem of knowing where slavery ends. As a consequence of this inflation, we are also promoting and encouraging skeptic skepticism surrounding whether anything in this world can it really be described in terms of slavery. Rhetorical inflation creates conditions of skepticism. I want to suggest that neither of these options are particularly satisfying, but both of them have important logic, and both of these logics are not simply or exclusively strategic moves. They are rooted in how people approached the issue. The alternative that i want to talk about is this idea of legal codification. Here i am looking at the 1926 sleeper convention, which we already heard about. Slavery convention, which we already heard about. I think this definition is important because it goes beyond political rhetoric and pro and personal opinion. We have a definition of slavery that governments have endorsed and supported, and as a consequence, it creates a benchmark against which behavior can be legitimately addressed. I want to briefly unpack this. It is important to know that when this was negotiated, there was an impulse to expand the definition of slavery very broadly, but that in polls was constricted down to a relatively narrow but that impulse was constructed to an air to a relatively narrow benchmark. This applies to not simply a legal slavery, but it also applies to defacto lived conditions. It establishes a benchmark that is relatively rigorous in its application. I would point your attention to a series of guidelines. A number of people in this room helped to create them. They emerge out of a Research Network that brought together historians and activists and people working on contemporary issues with a view to clarify what slavery looks like for the purposes of prosecution in interim in International Criminal tribunal is. It is designed as a guideline for prosecutors. The key element is that powers attaching it to right of ownership are not simply rights of ownership that are recognized in law, but are the functional equivalent to legal ownership in the event that such illegal status was even legal recognition. The example that is used here is that you cannot own a cocaine, because it is illegal, but in the event that you find it in your possession, you exercise a power attached to the right of ownership over it. On what basis do contemporary practical institutions sufficiently resemble the lived experience of the slave, and in historical terms, that we can legitimately classified them as slavery . We have a legal definition. I want to pretend it is perfect. It is an important starting point that we should use to begin a discussion about what slavery looks like. In addition, and i am going to do this very quickly, we also have overtime a broader series of benchmarks and obligations, which means in the present day, we have limited a reason to extend the slavery rhetorically by the fact that all the things that we might otherwise want to describe as slavery are codified and enshrined in various legal instruments. We have forced labor, we had debt bondage, we have a trafficking, and so on. In my previous work, i have suggested that this process of codification arises out of a series of reflections on the limitations of what has been previously accomplished. In the event that illegal abolition of slavery brought about certain consequential yet qualified improvements in how slaves lived, but in eight of itself, it was not sufficient. In my understanding of this, there is a bit of a dialectic at work where by reflections on the limitations of what was previously transpired or accomplished in turn provokes further mobilizations are around related and supplementary issues. We now have a situation where this applies in domestic law it is easier to talk about International Law because its scope is much broader. We now have a series of definitions. We now have a series of standards and criteria and obligations that we can use to talk about what slavery looks like, and more importantly, we have a conversation which is not confined or exclusive to slavery as a separate and distinct and exceptional category. Problems continue to rise in that while we had slavery alongside other practices, the point of intersection between slavery and these related issues still nonetheless poses a practical conceptual and legal problems. In order to think further in order to think further about this, i want to return to the history of slavery, and i want to think through some of the ways in which we conceptualize and draw upon these implicitly or explicitly series of historical benchmarks and apply them to contemporary practices. Whenever we tried to define or conceptualize slaveryrelated practices, we are invariably falling back on the various forms of classification by way of historical comparison. Here there is a hierarchy hierarchical set of assumptions at work. Slavery sits at the apex of a series of a hierarchy whereby it constitutes a fundamental dominion explication. Things that are placed on the hierarchy are elevated by that association or are tempted to be. Or they are minimized by the difference, which is the approach in terms of strategic minimization. Here once again efforts to describe and delineate slavery are never objective. There has been a strong tendency to minimize an excuse historical implicitly and involvement in enslavement throughout the world. And to insist as early as possible that things that look like slavery belong in some other category. In thinking about this, the iconography of the transatlantic slavery loans extremely large. I would suggest that while transatlantic slavery was a complicated, multifaceted, extremely diverse, and longstanding institution, in terms of how it feeds into debates of classification and conceptualization, it tends to be very simplified and stylized, whereby it slavery becomes ownership, slavery becomes extreme dominion and exploitation, and there is a series of ancillary associations with slavery being defined by rights, which is not always the case, slavery being defined in terms of economic exploitation, which is not always the case, slavery being defined as a separate and discrete category, which is not always the case elsewhere, and so on. In thinking about how we define and classify slavery, i want to suggest that this process of implicit comparison invariably ends up in an assessment of the relative similarity or severity on the basis of this inherited image we have of transatlantic slavery. Here slavery functions as a separate and stratified category. It is separate and distinct from other forms of human bondage. It is ratified in that it stands apart from and above other problems and practices. This is an approach that has a popular purchase or conscious, but it is also something that scholars feel defined and developed in various ways. The obvious example is slavery and social that. Slavery and social debt. On the other hand, we have alternative historiography and an alternative set of starting points that move beyond transatlantic slavery and instead try to complicate the historical story we tell by thinking about what slavery looked like in other parts of the world. This debate is by no means settled or definitive, but on one side, we have this idea that however much we may want to separate or extract out slavery, when you actually look at historical practices, legal practices, you instead find complicated forms of intersection and overlap with other forms of human bondage. In one version of this argument, the stronger version of this argument goes that the slavery that europeans abolished as a function of colonialism was actually a category of their own invention, which betrayed their own ignorance of how other practices in other parts of the world actually operated. I want to suggest here that a blended together approach, an approach that says that things can be both slavery and something else, is actually consistent with how slavery is operated as a longterm historic category. The definition and dilemmas and complications we have arising out of issues today actually stem out of a broad historic genealogy rather than being distinctive and fundamental and different to our moment in time. I want to suggest that blending together is a recurring dilemma. I want to suggest that it has a particular purchase in how we think about illegal he abolition of slavery. Theres a tendency that i think has done a great disservice to how we think about slavery to treat the abolition of slavery as a historical and point, a marker in a conversation that marks the end of the story in which the pushed that follows the postscript that follows is only three pages long. In keeping with the broader tenor of my work, i kind of a direct your attention to a series of patents associated with legal abolition that occur outside the americas. When we limit our historical horizons to transatlantic slavery, we have a narrative that finishes in 1888 in brazil and then picks up with globalization and in the early 1990s. I would instead suggest that you understand little abolition as a broader global process, you are instead in countering a number of publications. The little abolition of slavery in most parts of the world are bound up and deeply implicated in processes of colonization and imperialism that we have a hard time connecting and associating with an abolition of something that is universally regarded as one of humanitys great accomplishments. We have a complicated story once we Start Talking about the abolition in other parts of the wo