In this introductory essay, the author starts from observing that today slavery not only appears in public discourse as an institution of the past, but even as an “aberration” of history: in this view, the disappearance of slavery corresponds to the birth of modernity, founded on human rights, on the equal dignity of every person and on democracy. However, slavery is still with us, as it is shown by every day media reports on cases of slavery around the world, even in the West. For this reason, in the opinion of the author, if one wants to understand the contemporary forms of slavery, it is necessary to analyze the phenomenon in a broader and historical perspective.

Today’s use of terms such as “trade” and “slavery” is so broad and widespread that some people talk of an unprecedented renewal of these phenomena. In fact, excluding metaphorical or media exaggerations, cases of real enslavement are mostly found in Asian situations due to endebtment (bondage labour), and within international criminal networks, which exploit or induce prostitution in a situation of administrative irregularity. In most other cases instead, the language of slavery conflates and conceals various other phenomena, such as illegal forms of recruitment through gangmasters (caporalato), illegal confiscation or forfeiture of wages, exploitive deception and manipulation at the expense of workers.

According to a recent estimate there are about 36 million of modern slaves in the world. Independently from the reliability of this figure what is to be discussed and clarified is how to define modern slavery. The paper addresses this issue. It starts with an analysis of the debate that has been going in recent times and then – taking inspiration from Hirschman’s categories -- suggests that a crucial criterion for a situation to be classified as modern slavery should be the lack of the formal possibility of exiting from it, independently from the reason that originated such lack.

The paper examines the persistence, also in modern legal systems, of working practices typical of servile and slave labour. The first part of the paper reconstructs the attempt promoted by ILO, with the Declaration of 1995 on core labour rights, to introduce universally binding standards aimed at assuring a decent work at the global level, an effort supported by the movements of Porto Alegre’s World Social Forum. The second part reconstructs the systems consenting especially in Italy, the presence of a class of temporary sub-workers who sometimes have no compensation. Finally, it is examined the question whether, today, the technological revolution and the activities carried out through digital platforms might overcome the most hierarchical and coercive aspects of subordinate employment contract.

Before invading Ethiopia on oct. 3rd 1935, and during the first months of the war, the fascist regime used the slavery issue as a tool of propaganda. Its aim was twofold: to “sell” the war as a “civilising mission”, acceptable by the international public opinion following the standards of colonial “humanitarian imperialism”; and to cause the expulsion of Ethiopia from the League of Nation, where it was admitted in 1923, on the base of “indignity” allegations. Ethiopian slavery was in the 1930s a very hot issue. After the Act of the Bruxelles Conference (1890), which conceived colonisation as a legitimate antislavery measure, the existence of slavery in the only independent African country was a source of diplomatic activism by the colonial powers. Following the guidelines of the Ministry of Press and Propaganda Italian newspapers, journals and publishers made of slavery the symbol of an “abyssinian barbarism”, which called for a humanitarian civilising intervention. British antislavery literature was used as a major source both of data and information about slavery in Ethiopia, and of opinions about the need of foreign intervention. A complete failure from a diplomatic point of view, fascist antislavery propaganda is a very interesting – albeit understudied – topic for the insights it offers on cultural issues of the late colonial era and on the participation of scholars to fascist imperialism.

This article inquires into the critical legal procedure following the crimes of slavery and human trade for sexual exploitation. We wondered about the epistemological and legal implications of the recent transformations of sex trade and the effect that this produces on judicial context. We have given particular attention to the identification of the human trade victims during trial and to the instruments used by law in order to properly face the continuous changes within the personal dependence relations. The current research highlights processes of reification and victimization within the legal procedure: special attention is given to the public debate which unfolds around the narrations of the injured parties.

The article aims at contributing to a new vision and interpretation of slavery as part of the Western legal system and wants to reflect on the connection between states, empires and colonies, in order to demonstrate how colonialism and racism are constitutive elements of modernity, that is, their dark side. This article therefore analyzes, on the one hand, the Italian and international historiography and, on the other hand, the cases of the French and Haitian Revolution. Recent works on the subject have included the study of slavery institution in the widest branch of racial and social problems, including the coordinates of Black Atlantic, the focus of a new scientific age.

The gangmasters’ hiring, as a form of illegal labour intermediation and brutal control of man by man, is not a thing of the past. On the contrary, it has massively come back on the scene in recent years, especially in the last decade. However the author notes that, there is an obvious difference with the Twentieth century: in fact, with regard to the heavier and less qualified agricultural tasks, in most cases, the southern Italian farmers have been replaced by new day labourers coming from Africa and Eastern Europe. In fact, just in the south of Italy, in the last decade, there have been the worst cases of exploitation and neo-slavery, not of native workers, but regarding foreign workers, as in the case of Rosarno in Calabria and Nardò in Puglia.

The article aims at demonstrating that slavery persisted in Rome and Civitavecchia until the first half of 19 th Century. My archival research covers exactly the period of 1750-1808. I present slavery cases in connection with the problem of the Mediterranean slavery, focusing my research on religious problems and living conditions. The rite of baptism is also the manifestation of the link between slavery and religious problems. Indeed, conversion is a double-sided instrument: on the one hand, for the most part religion tries to be a process of integration, on the other hand religion tries to coerce the slave. For this reason baptism is also a form of agency and it is not merely a practice that slaves undergo.

This article analyses patrimonial discourses through a number of key study sites mainly based in metropolitan France and its overseas Caribbean departments. It foregrounds four discursive strategies that enable the slave past to become visible through the medium of museography — namely, periodization, national narration, witness sites and monumentality. Overall, it argues that the museographical strategies that are intended to voice the slave past force slavery to conform to circumstantial political demands. More than that, they serve to shape the museum narrative itself, such that this chapter questions the extent to which the museum can ever provide adequate knowledge about, and recognition for, the human experience of slavery.

In this essay, the author highlights an important point of contact between the thinking of Marx and that of Mommsen, with reference to the theme of slavery in ancient Rome. Marx, in fact, precisely in the years in which Mommsen published his most important work, namely the History of Rome, was studying the historical forms of employment, while writing his masterpiece Das Kapital. This confrontation between the two great German thinkers, according to the author of the essay, should prove that Marx’s idea of ancient slavery was too hasty and uniform. In the view of Canfora, Karl Marx wanted above all to demonstrate how huge was the difference between old and modern capitalism.

The article deals with the issue of slavery celebrations in France to demonstrate how the celebration of the past French slave system is an example of the threat of a return of slavery phenomenon, although in new forms, in the present “cognitive capitalism” model. To the author’s opinion, it is precisely from this new perspective of analysis that the issue of the struggle against slavery should be resumed. The celebration of the slavery phenomenon of the past should not be understood as a pious remembrance of sad events that should never be repeated, possibly to obtain compensation for passed damages, but to prevent that a new form of post-modern and hyper-industrial slavery may unconsciously be established today.

This essay looks at the history of nineteenth-century American Abolitionism, defined as the movement seeking the immediate emancipation of the U.S. slave population, by focusing on the crucial influence of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, the “Garrisonians.” In doing this, the essay looks at the activities of the main U.S. abolitionist organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and at the different views of the abolitionist struggle held by the “anti-Garrisonians.” Also, in line with the most recent historiographical developments, the essay looks at some of the transnational influences on American Abolitionism, and at Garrison’s own transnational contacts within the wider Euro-American world.