Every American schoolchild learns a few facts about Christopher Columbus: he sailed to America in 1492, he had three ships, and so on. However, the truth about Columbus is much more complicated than that.
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History textbooks often ignore the achievements of other explorers. Europeans, including Vikings, traveled to America for centuries before Columbus did—the difference is that these people arrived at a time when Europe wasn’t ready to take advantage of its new land holdings.
Many textbooks explain the factors that led to European exploration of the Americas in the 15th century. However, many of these explanations are flawed and misrepresent facts. For example, some books suggest that Europeans were curious about new places or needed spices for food, but there is no evidence to support those claims. They also say that Muslims blocked trade routes from Europe to Asia and therefore Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. This explanation suggests prejudice against Muslims since it assumes they would discriminate against Christians during trading activities.
The military technology of the European countries in the 15th century led to their exploration of the Americas. The monarchs wanted bigger guns and better ships, which they used to dominate other countries. Western nations still use this same policy today; for example, when the Bush administration lobbied against nuclear weapons in Third World countries’ hands, it was using a similar strategy that Spain used back in 1492.
Columbus’ voyage was motivated by various factors. One of them is the buildup of social technology, such as bookkeeping and printing. Another factor was that people believed that becoming wealthy and controlling other people would get you to Heaven. Columbus writes in his writings about why he wanted to explore to the Americas: he wanted glory for himself and be rewarded in Heaven. In contrast, many textbooks downplay explorers’ economic motive as if it were somehow “undignified.” A fifth reason is that European nations had “practiced” dominating island societies earlier in the century. Finally, a major factor in Europeans’ successful exploration of the Americas was their immunity from diseases like smallpox and influenza—diseases that claimed huge numbers of Native American lives. People assume that Western, European countries are the most powerful in the world. However, they never ask themselves why this is so. The truth is that Europe came to rule over South America for very specific reasons: military technology, immunity to disease and careful organization.
Another common bias in textbooks is that modern technology was a European invention. However, Phoenician explorers rounded the Cape of Good Hope centuries before Europeans did so using impressive maritime technology. This omission is particularly striking because these explorations inspired 15th century Europeans, including Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal who organized many important expeditions to America. Instead of treating technology as a product of complex cultural diffusion, most textbooks characterize it as an European invention.
A lot of people think that Columbus was the first European to discover America. However, there is evidence that other Europeans discovered America before him. Therefore, it’s important for textbooks to acknowledge this possibility and present a more accurate account of history. It’s also important for textbooks to mention African explorers who may have reached North America centuries before Columbus did so as well. This would help dispel racist myths about Europeans being superior to all other civilizations on earth.
If you compare the accounts of African and Irish exploration in history textbooks, then you’ll realize that most American textbooks are Eurocentric. The reason is that almost half of them mention possible African exploration in the Americas, but none mention possible Irish exploration.
Textbooks say that Columbus explored the Americas and discovered a new world. They also say he was an explorer who sailed around the world to prove it was round, despite his crew’s doubts. However, there is no proof of this and other details have been exaggerated by textbooks. For example, they suggest that Columbus died poor and lonely but in fact he died famous with many supporters as soon as he returned from his voyage. Textbooks often distort facts to make them more dramatic for students reading them.
Columbus discovered America and brought back many people to Spain. He also kidnapped some of the natives, took them to Spain as slaves, and forced his men to rape native women in order to find gold. The Spanish settlers forced many people into slavery by mining for gold. Within a few years, most of the indigenous population was gone because they were killed off or died from diseases that came with Europeans. Africans were then made into slaves after European settlers pushed them out of North America.
The information Loewen has been discussing up to this point is well-known and undisputed. However, history textbooks still praise Columbus as a hero or mention his genocidal policies in passing without any criticism.
The discovery of America had a huge impact on Europe. It caused the Europeans to see themselves as one unified race, in contrast to the newly discovered people from America who were considered uncivilized. Many textbooks ignore this change in European culture and perpetuate the idea that Europeans have always seen themselves at the center of the world. Christopher Columbus was brave to travel across the Atlantic Ocean, but his conquest of Native Americans was racist. He may have been a product of his time, but there were also people who opposed him and wanted to stop what he did. When textbooks present him as an unambiguous hero, they offend African Americans and Native Americans by not acknowledging that their ancestors had already discovered America long before Columbus did. They also bore students with feel-good history that isn’t interesting or relevant for today’s world.
Chapter 1 summary
Chapter 1 begins with epigraphs from author James Baldwin, historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, and Harvard professor Charles V. Willie about the tendency of Americans to idolize their ancestors. This chapter is about heroification, which is what author James W. Loewen calls the “degenerative process” that turns remarkable yet flawed people into history book heroes. Loewen provides two examples in this chapter: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller.
Helen Keller doesn’t always find her way into history textbooks, but she’s a staple of social studies classes around the country. As the result of an illness, Keller became deaf and blind at age 19 months. She is known for her friendship with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, and her remarkable ability to read and write. Keller’s adulthood was spent as a radical socialist and an unwavering champion of civil rights. History books have all but erased that part of her life, preferring instead to cast her as a childlike model of American grit and perseverance.
President Woodrow Wilson is subjected to even greater heroification. History textbooks laud him for his support of progressive causes like the women’s suffrage movement and his role in the formation of the League of Nations following World War I. They leave out the fact that he was a white supremacist who oversaw the segregation of the federal government for the first time since Reconstruction. They also fail to mention he instigated the invasions of several Latin American countries and inserted the United States into a Russian civil war. He didn’t even support the suffragists’ movement until he figured out doing so would help him politically. He did good things, yes, but he also did terrible things.
Loewen believes textbook authors leave out damning information like this “to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible.” They are presented as ideals to which one can aspire, not real people to whom one can relate. The reasons behind this practice are many: the desire to protect students from negative influences, pressure from committees who select textbooks for school use, and even the innate human desire to have uncomplicated icons. The result is that high school students know very little (and care even less) about the people portrayed in their history books.
Analysis
Chapter 1 sets up one of the main ideas Loewen comes back to again and again in Lies My Teacher Told Me—history books distort facts about historical figures in favor of heroification. There’s a lot to unpack in this claim. First, it indicates that history textbooks are more biased than people think. Textbook authors determine not only who students should learn about but what they should know about them. The result is a very slanted look at the past. Loewen argues that history books are designed not to impart information but to make the United States and its leaders look good. One would expect to find such blatant nationalism in the texts of a totalitarian regime, like North Korea, but not in the democratic, free press–guaranteeing United States. Second, Loewen is saying that history books don’t just leave out facts about the past—sometimes they change them completely. Students are learning things that simply aren’t true.
There are plenty of history books and primary sources that tell the unfiltered stories behind the founding and existence of the United States. The problem is that authors, publishers, and those who select books for schools don’t think the truth about the past is suitable for elementary, middle, and high school audiences. Some may think the past is too grim or gory for minors. Others might think certain events or decisions, such as Wilson’s many foreign interventions, are an embarrassment to the nation’s history. These people forget that children are naturally inquisitive about the motivations behind bad decisions and failures. Loewen asserts such topics are exactly what children need to learn in the classroom if such foibles are to be avoided in the future.
Champions of bland textbooks argue that heroification of historical figures gives students ideals to which they can aspire. Loewen disagrees. Like the three men he quotes in the chapter’s epigraphs—all of whom are African American and all of whom probably never saw the history of their ancestors portrayed truthfully or heroically—Loewen thinks heroification does an enormous disservice to students by leaving them without any realistic role models. Everyone has flaws, even heads of state. Having the opportunity to see and analyze those flaws gives students a better opportunity to connect with the people they’re reading about and to understand that their own flaws do not prevent them from achieving great things.
W R I T T E N
E X E RC I S E # 1
“ O N E I S A S T O N I S H E D I N T H E S T U D Y O F H I S T O RY A T T H E R E C U R R E N C E O F T H E I D E A T H A T
E V I L M U S T B E F O R G O T T E N , D I S T O R T E D , S K I M M E D OV E R . W E M U S T N O T R E M E M B E R T H A T
DA N I E L W E B S T E R G O T D R U N K B U T O N LY R E M E M B E R T H A T H E W A S A S P L E N D I D
C O N S T I T U T I O N A L L A W Y E R . W E M U S T F O R G E T T H A T G E O R G E W A H I N G T O N W A S A S L AV E
O W N E R … A N D S I M P L Y R E M E M B E R T H E T H I N G S W E R E G A R D A S C R E D I TA B L E A N D I N S P I R I N G .
T H E D I F F I C U L T Y, O F C O U R S E , W I T H T H I S P H I L O S O P H Y I S T H A T H I S T O RY L O S E S I T S VA L U E A S
A N I N C E N T I V E A N D E X A M P L E ; I T PA I N T S P E R F E C T M E N A N D N O B L E N A T I O N S , B U T I T D O E S
N O T T E L L T H E T R U T H . ”
~ W. E . B . D U B O I S ( B L A C K R E C O N S T R U C T I O N )
What is history? Why should we study history? Within the context of our stories
concerning Christopher Columbus, Native Americans, the Pilgrims, or slavery,
discuss how historians (Zinn and Loewen) have dealt with the above issues
specifically. How have history textbooks begun to complicate our histories even
further? With regard to the above topics, how have your readings and studies in
this class differed from the ways in which these topics have been portrayed (all the
way back to elementary school) to you in previous classes? In the quote above,
W.E.B. DuBois suggests that in our studies of history, when we skim over the bad
parts, our histories begin to lose their value as “incentive and example.” What
does he mean by this? What are the far-reaching consequences of the ways in
which so many of us have been taught history?
“ H I S T O R Y I S F I C T I O N , E XC E P T F O R T H E PA R T S T H A T I L I K E , W H I C H A R E , O F C O U R S E , T R U E . ”
~ J I M C O R D E R
U N I T E D S T A T E S H I S T O R Y
A M Y B E L L
DIREC TIONS
1) Your response to the question must be typed—twelve point font, double-spaced,
one-inch margins. In writing your answer, please do not exceed five pages.
2) In your response, use only your assig ned text(s), the instructor’s handouts, or
class notes taken from discussions. Do not use additional library or internet
sources.
3) Your generalizations must be supported by direct citations from the text, class
notes, or instructor’s handouts.
4) Citations should be made in MLA format. For class notes or presentations, you
might use: (60’s handout) or (class notes).
Note: You must cite parenthetically throughout your narrative. Please follow this format. There
should be many citations throughout your response taken from the sources noted above because
assumptions and interpretations must be bolstered by citations. The strength of your response is
dependent largely upon your citation of the assigned sources.
5) Do not include a bibliography.
6) You may consult with your classmates in formulating an answer to this question.
However, you must write your own, unique, independent answer to this question.
7) Date Due: See eCampus Instructions
“ C O M P R E H E N S I O N D O E S N O T M E A N D E N Y I N G T H E O U T R A G E O U S , D E D U C I N G T H E
U N P R E C E D E N T E D F R O M P R E C E D E N C E , O R E X P L A I N I N G P H E N O M E N A B Y S U C H A N A L O G I E S A N D
G E N E R A L I T I E S T H A T T H E I M PA C T O F R E A L I T Y A N D T H E S H O C K O F E X P E R I E N C E A R E N O
L O N G E R F E L T. I T M E A N S , R A T H E R , E X A M I N I N G A N D B E A R I N G C O N S C I O U S L Y T H E B U R D E N
W H I C H O U R C E N T U RY H A S P L A C E D O N U S – N E I T H E R D E N Y I N G I T S E X I S T E N C E N O R
S U B M I T T I N G M E E K L Y T O I T S W E I G H T. ”
~ H A N N A H A R E N D T
2
“One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. we must not remember that Daniel webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. we must…
“History is fiction, except for the parts that I like, Which are, of course, true.” ~ Jim Corder
Directions
“Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedence, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, e…
begins with an assortment of epigraphs that allude to the inaccurate way the formative years of white European society in the United States is portrayed. According to the 18 history books James W.
Loewen
analyzed, the United States was settled in 1620 when the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock on the Mayflower. Like the myth that
Christopher Columbus
discovered the Americas, this origin story isn’t true. Native Americans had been settled in villages up and down the East Coast for hundreds of years. Before the arrival of the English Pilgrims, the Spanish had created their own settlements. There was even an English colony in what is now known as Virginia.
Loewen lists several reasons as to why history textbooks credit the Pilgrims for being the first settlers of the United States. Among other things, the Pilgrims were more palatable than their Virginian counterparts. They came to North American with the intent of staying here, unlike the Virginians, who were looking for treasure to take back home. The Pilgrims were generally kind to the natives and even paid them for their assistance. The Virginians enslaved the Native Americans in their area. The second major reason so much emphasis is put on the Pilgrims is the background of the textbook authors themselves. Nearly all the books in Loewen’s collection were written by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). Conversely, the two textbooks written by people with Hispanic surnames are the only ones that provide information about earlier Spanish settlements. Loewen believes writers tell the stories that best reflect their ancestors.
Just because most textbook authors focus on the Pilgrims doesn’t mean they get the story right. The Plymouth colonists are often credited with taming North American forests to establish their settlement. In reality, they took over an abandoned native village. They are credited with withstanding the threats of native peoples to create civilization. In reality, there were hardly any native peoples around when the Pilgrims landed. Between 1617 and 1620, more than 90 percent of New England’s indigenous peoples died of disease brought to North America by European explorers and settlers. Natives who survived, including Squanto (who was actually in Europe during most of that time), befriended the Pilgrims partly because they no longer had a community who could protect them. Many history textbooks also lavishly praise the Pilgrims for, as one book puts it, being the first to “consciously creat[e] a government where none had existed before.” Loewen points out they are overlooking numerous political entities established before 1620, including the Republic of Iceland and the Iroquois Confederacy.
One of the biggest lies told by high school history textbooks is the story of the first Thanksgiving. As the story goes, the Pilgrims invited their Native American neighbors over for an enormous feast to give thanks to God for providing them with such bounty. Everything about this is wrong. If there was indeed a feast, the food was probably brought by the natives. The Pilgrims didn’t come up with the idea for an “autumnal harvest celebratio[n]”—that had been a practice of Eastern Native Americans for hundreds of years. In fact, Thanksgiving wasn’t celebrated in the United States until 1863, when President
Abraham Lincoln
declared it a national holiday to boost patriotism during the Civil War. The Pilgrims weren’t attached to the mythology of the holiday until the 1890s.
Loewen cautions that “glorify[ing] the Pilgrims is dangerous” and likens the practice to the real-life censorship of a Frank James, a Wampanoag Indian who was asked to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing in 1970. His speech was called off once the all-white Massachusetts Department of Commerce read his draft, which truthfully described how white Europeans nearly extinguished the Wampanoag tribe. Loewen exhorts the reader to remember that the “‘truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.'”
Analysis
Chapter 3 introduces the concepts of ethnocentrism and American exceptionalism. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s race, culture, or ethnic group is superior to all others. Similarly, American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is better than all other nations. Textbooks teach these ideas when they relate the myths about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. Historical scholars know these heartwarming stories aren’t true, as Loewen indicates by the epigraphs from three historians, despite the importance of the truth, as indicated by the fourth quotation from a 19th-century soldier and diplomat.
The way textbooks tell it, the Pilgrims were pious and moral people who withstood terrible hardship in a foreign land just so they could start their lives anew. Loewen goes to great length and detail to prove that isn’t entirely true. The Pilgrims did make a fresh start in a new land, but they did it with enormous help from the local Indians, whom they robbed as soon as they reached land. The Pilgrims didn’t have to do the backbreaking work of clearing land for their settlement nor did they have to figure out what to eat or where to grow it. Somebody else did that for them. Textbooks attribute the Pilgrims’ good fortune to God, not to the Indians who invited the white strangers into their homes, taught them how to grow food, and even helped them set up fur trading businesses. The ethnocentric portrayal of the Pilgrims completely erases the importance and impact of the local Native American tribes.
So does the story of the first Thanksgiving. In the version found in most history textbooks, the Pilgrims provide the feast for the barely-clothed natives. The white people are the providers for the nonwhites. Loewen points out the same thing happens in most textbooks’ descriptions of slavery. The white slave owners are described as providing food, clothing, and shelter for their black slaves when, really, it was the slaves who were growing food and planting, picking, spinning, and weaving cotton for clothing. They built their own homes, as well as those of their owners. Time and time again, white people are cast as heroes in history books while nonwhites are depicted as being entirely dependent on them for survival.
Ethnocentrism in history textbooks is exacerbated by the ideas authors choose to leave out. Students learn about the Pilgrims’ voyage to North America and what their lives were like when they got here. They never hear about the lives of Native Americans before the Pilgrims arrived nor how native lives changed after the Pilgrims set foot on shore. Omissions like these imply that the only stories worth telling are white stories. Loewen argues throughout the book that ethnocentric practices like this are incredibly damaging to students who do not identify as white—either they come to believe that because their history isn’t important, they aren’t important, or they simply give up on history altogether.
One of the main reasons Loewen wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me is to show that history can be fun and interesting for students of every age. Squanto’s abduction from his tribe, travel to Europe, life as a slave, and his escape back to the United States is much more interesting than the one line of text history textbooks usually dedicate to him—”He … learned [the Pilgrims’] language from English fishermen.” With every additional fact and anecdote, Loewen proves history can be fun.
It can also be factual without being depressing or anti-American. Loewen isn’t advocating for textbook authors to tell only the bad parts of American history or to go out of their way to slander the country’s image. He simply wants textbooks to be truthful and inclusive. That means showing the good and the bad, the triumphs and the mistakes. He hypothesizes that the United States would be a much more tolerant place if students were taught the truth about the past. Unfortunately, that hypothesis can’t be tested as long as history textbooks maintain the status quo.
NewYork Review of Books
Volume 45, Number 10 · June 11, 1998
Review
The Betrayal of History
By Alexander Stille
OTHER TEXTBOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
A History of US
by Joy Hakim
Oxford University Press, 10 volumes pp., $10.95 each (paper)
Our United States
Silver Burdett Ginn, 656 pp., $39.00
United States: Adventures in Time and Space
Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, 765 pp., $51.96
1.
Columbia University Professor Jack Garraty was surprised to open the latest edition of the
eighth-grade textbook he had written in 1982 and learn that a Spanish explorer named
Bartolomeo Gomez, and not the Englishman Henry Hudson, was credited with being the first
European to discover the Hudson River. Garraty, who had taught history for thirty years, had
never heard of Bartolomeo Gomez. After some research, he learned that Gomez was in fact
Portuguese and not Spanish and that his claim to have discovered the Hudson River was
based on extremely slender evidence: he had sailed along the Atlantic Coast and made a
map that described three rivers, one of which might, or might not, be the Hudson.
“The map didn’t even include Long Island,” Garraty said. “He certainly didn’t sail into the river.”
But the publisher of the book, Holt, Rinehart, anxious to create a new multicultural hero and to
cater to the substantial Hispanic populations of Texas and California—the largest markets in
the nation for textbooks—had elevated this obscure Portuguese explorer into the Spanish
discoverer of the Hudson and inserted him in Garraty’s book without his permission.
The American history taught in schools has been rewritten and transformed in recent decades
by a handful of large publishers who are much concerned to meet the demands of both the
multicultural left and the conservative religious right. In 1994, when Texas announced that it
wanted to purchase new social studies textbooks for fifth-grade students, major publishers
competed to produce history textbooks that would not be offensive to political and cultural
pressure groups in the state. Four textbooks by different publishers were formally adopted as
suitable for Texas last year; and children throughout the country will be reading one or another
of them during the next five to ten years.
They will be doing so because the states of Texas and California taken together account for
20 percent of the textbooks sold in America. They are the biggest of some twenty-two states
that review and choose textbooks on a state-wide basis, and their choices therefore have
disproportionate influence among the fifty states. Approval of a textbook series in Texas or
California guarantees millions of dollars in sales, while rejection will almost certainly mean
financial failure. Textbook publishers spend much time answering angry letters from Christian
fundamentalists and counting the illustrations in their books to make sure that they have the
requisite number of women and minorities. “We would sometimes joke that we should just
leave some of the presidents out of the book so that we could make our fifty-fifty male-female
quota,” I was told by a woman who worked as an editor of one textbook.
To satisfy the religious right, many textbooks have largely banished the words “imagine” and
“feel.” According to an editor at McGraw-Hill, who did not want to be identified, “We were told
to try to avoid using the word ‘imagine’ because the people in Texas felt it was too close to
the word ‘magic’ and therefore might be considered anti-Christian. Instead of saying ‘Imagine
you were sailing across the Atlantic with Christopher Columbus,’ we were encouraged to write
‘Suppose you were…”‘ Some editors told me that they had taken out most references to
Halloween (even in music textbooks, Halloween songs were removed) because these could
be construed as encouraging belief in witches and hobgoblins and lead to satanic practices.
Spokesmen for the religious right and other conservative groups vigilantly criticize any critical
references to America’s traditional heroes; they equally oppose harsh accounts of slavery and
positive descriptions of the “socialistic” policies of the New Deal or the charter of the United
Nations. At one of the Texas hearings, a representative of the Daughters of the American
Revolution congratulated the four principal textbook publishers for including the Pledge of
Allegiance in their books but then took them to task for failing to capitalize the word “nation”
in the phrase “One Nation under God.” “You publishers know who you are and shame on you.”
On noticing a poem and photograph of Langston Hughes in one book, she asked: “What is a
known Communist doing in a Texas third-grade textbook pertaining to heritage and culture?
Did he ever come to Texas?… Black is not always beautiful.”
Over the years, such constant pressures have had an effect. “I can definitely see
improvements in some areas,” says Mel Gabler, who for some thirty-five years has led the
campaign to make the Christian conservative point of view prevail in textbook adoptions. “Our
state has a law that the students must be taught the benefits of free enterprise. They have
tended to take a collectivist or statist view of things…. The books now do teach the benefits
of free enterprise.”
On the other hand, to forestall criticism from the multicultural left, publishers have drawn up
new lists of taboos. The words “tribe” and “Indian” are out, in favor of “group” and “Native
American,” even though many Native Americans use and prefer the former terms. The word
“slave” has been banished, replaced by “enslaved person,” on the grounds that slavery was a
temporary condition that was imposed upon people, not part of their essence as human
beings. But “slave” is a far more stark and powerful word, expressing much more accurately
the horror of the owning, buying, and selling of human beings. The term “enslaved persons”
sounds like a bureaucrat’s euphemism.
Even “African-American,” until recently the most politically correct of the current labels, has
come in for criticism: some activists have insisted that the word should not be used to apply to
the period before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, since only then did blacks become
American citizens. “This is ludicrous,” says one editor who worked on one of the current social
studies texts. “It’s one thing to refer to a man who has just stepped off a slave ship in the
seventeenth century as an African, but it’s absurd to refer to someone living in 1860, whose
parents and even grandparents may have been born in this country, as Africans.”
The Harcourt Brace history book, America’s Story, goes a step farther, referring to the black
troops fighting in the Civil War simply as “Africans,” even though they enlisted after the
Emancipation Proclamation. This robs the men, for a second time, of the right they were
fighting for: to be recognized as full American citizens.
“In trying to avoid anything that might be offensive to either the left or the right, we were
reduced to producing totally bland, middle-of-the-road pabulum,” says one Macmillan/
McGraw-Hill editor who, unsurprisingly, was not eager to be identified.
Before submitting their books to state adoption committees, publishers try to anticipate
possible objections by privately soliciting the views of various pressure groups. “Before, we used
to send the books out to scholars,” a senior editor explained. “Now we also send them to one
reader for the Islamic point of view, to a feminist, an African-American, an Asian-American, a
Native American, and a Christian fundamentalist so that they are carefully screened.”
Many of the changes urged by this or that pressure group can be justified and defended, but
the overall result is what has been aptly called a “conspiracy of good intentions”; the need to
please or not offend every possible constituency has paralyzed textbook writers. Each
paragraph is a carefully negotiated compromise, making it virtually impossible for a textbook
to have a distinctive voice, not to mention humor, moral outrage, or evocative prose.
“It is a process that is destined to produce a dumbed-down product,” says Byron Hollinshead,
the head of American Historical Publications, and formerly president of American Heritage
and Oxford University Press. “The Harvard Education Letter,” he told me, “once compared
textbooks to pet food. Pet food is not really concocted for pets, it’s meant to appeal to pet
owners. Textbooks are not written for children, they are written for textbook committees who
flip through them to make sure they have the right ethnic balance and the proper buzz words.”
2.
Hollinshead recently entered the children’s textbook field by editing a maverick series of
American history texts called A History of US, published by Oxford. The books, written by Joy
Hakim, an independent writer and grandmother from Virginia, are a refreshing exception in
the otherwise bleak textbook scene. A former schoolteacher and journalist, Hakim was
appalled by the dullness of the textbooks she saw and decided she could do a better job
herself. As she began writing her first book, she tested it on children at a local Virginia
elementary school and she paid them to comment on her manuscript, marking passages that
were interesting, dull, or unclear.
Even though she was only circulating computer printouts, other classes that were using regular
textbooks began asking to use her book. While virtually all the other textbooks are written by
committees in as neutral a tone as possible, and do little more than present a series of events,
dates, and people, Hakim tried to make story-telling central to her work. Her books have a
distinctive personal voice and are enjoyable to read. They have been praised by, among
many others, cultural conservatives such as Lynne Cheney, back-to-basics educators such as
Diane Ravitch, liberal teachers in inner-city schools, and prominent professional historians. (“I
was impressed by the accuracy and the depth of her research,” said James McPherson, a
professor of American history at Princeton University.) And while Hakim’s books contain more
of the traditional subjects of American history than others, they also include more about
women and minorities. In this respect, McPherson told me, “I thought her book did a good job
of inclusiveness without being obtrusive.”
It is not politics, however, that sets A History of US apart, it is its prose. Hakim believes in the
value of narrative history for children. She was impressed by a study showing that children
retained far more of what they read when the texts were written by professional writers rather
than education specialists. Three pairs of writers—composition instructors, linguists, and Time-
Life journalists—were all asked to rewrite the same passages from a widely used history
textbook. The texts by the education specialists produced no improvement in students’
comprehension, while students retained 40 percent more from the passages written by the
two professional journalists.[1]
Whether or not standard textbook publishers have heard of this study, its lesson has been sadly
ignored. Perhaps more disturbing than the new politically correct orthodoxy is the astonishing
decline in the literary quality of textbooks: their skimpy, superficial treatment of events, the
increasing proliferation of pictures and graphics, and the use of oversimple language. Indeed,
the most striking difference between the current textbooks and their predecessors is visual. The
older textbooks are mainly composed of text—with engravings or photographs appearing
from time to time. During the last few decades, illustrations have become more frequent and
elaborate. The most recent textbooks appear to be designed on the debatable premise that
they must compete with Nintendo video games and MTV. The books bombard the reader with
images, maps, charts, broken-out quotes, and a rainbow of colors and typefaces, as if the
average ten- or eleven-year-old child suffered from an attention disorder. There are sometimes
twelve or thirteen pages of illustrations and filler between chapters, while the chapters
themselves—dealing with long periods of American history—have been reduced to four or five
short and heavily illustrated pages. Although recent textbooks have gotten bigger and
bigger—generally about 700 large-format pages, weighing a few pounds each—the historical
text itself has shrunk.
The authors seem to have so little confidence in their ability to interest readers in their story that
they interrupt it constantly with such features as “response activities”—little boxes that ask, for
example, “Why does it matter?”—and sections on “Making Social Studies Relevant.”
In the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill fifth-grade history, United States: Adventures in Time and Space,
there are one hundred and fourteen “time lines” charting the dates of different events as well
as one hundred and thirty-five maps, sixty-five charts, graphs, and diagrams, twenty-one “skills
lessons,” six lessons in “citizenship,” ten “infographics,” and fourteen illustrated questionnaires
headed “Did you know?” Occasionally, such material can be helpful, but more often than not
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it is distracting, boring, and trivial, cutting down space for a more serious treatment of events.
The hundreds of graphic presentations seem designed not so much to interest children as to
sell the book to teachers and education administrators who are more likely to flip through a
prospective textbook looking for “special features” than to read it. Many of the books devote
many pages to homework questions, games, and suggested classroom activities that seem
likely to bore most students; they may appeal, though, to the lazier teachers who want both
to keep the class busy and to avoid working with longer and more detailed texts.
The worst offender in this respect may be the Harcourt history book, whose historical text makes
up about one quarter of its roughly 700 pages. As if it is appealing to a barely literate child, it
makes use of a “story cloth”: the reader is asked, for example, to “study the pictures shown in
this story cloth to help you review the events you read about in Unit 2.” The story cloth consists
of contemporary illustrations evidently intended to recall, as simply as possible, events from
the previous chapter: Columbus arriving on San Salvador, a European trader buying a fur from
an Indian.
Instead of having confidence in the interest of historical events themselves, most of the books
include very short, made-up stories, generally extremely bland and banal, about fictional
children. To describe Mexico the Harcourt book presents a wholly unreal and unhistorical story
called “Save My Rain- forest,” about a little Mexican boy named Omar who hears a report on
TV about a dying rain forest and decides to walk almost nine hundred miles from Mexico City
in order to save it.
“Early one morning Omar and his father start walking,” the story begins, introducing Omar’s
account:
We decided to go…to see the governor of the state of Chiapas, where the rainforest is. He is
responsible for taking care of it. We need to tell him to save the rainforest so there will still be a
rain-forest in Mexico for us children when we grow up.
To open a chapter on the Native Americans first encountered by the Spanish conquerors, the
Macmillan/ McGraw-Hill book presents a boy who is said to descend from the Pueblo Indians.
“‘Before dancing, I get a little nervous,’ says Timmy Roybal, a 10-year-old from the San Ildefonso
Pueblo in New Mexico. ‘My legs start shaking, but they settle down once I am dancing. When
I am dancing, I feel I am part of everything.’ Timmy is talking about the Green Corn Dance, in
which Pueblo peoples give thanks for all that nature has given them.”
At the same time, photographs frequently crowd out texts. Houghton Mifflin’s textbook, Build
Our Nation, devotes no more than thirty-three lines to the Great Depression and the entire
Roosevelt administration, while giving over two full pages to Cal Ripken, Jr., the Baltimore
Orioles shortstop who in 1995 beat Lou Gehrig’s record for playing in consecutive games.
Along with robbing the books of content, the shift from words to images in the books has had
another drastic consequence: it has made the books extremely expensive to produce. To
develop a new textbook series can cost more than $35 million. Moreover, because of the laws
of states like Texas and California, publishers also must produce a Spanish edition (on which
they generally lose money) as well as a special teacher’s edition and workbooks, not to
mention promotional gimmicks and free handouts to help sell the books to textbook
committees. A writer and a small group of editors used to be able to produce a textbook;
now, more than one hundred people are involved.
The process is so risky and expensive that it has encouraged the formation of textbook
conglomerates, with publishers swallowing one another at an alarming rate: Macmillan has
merged with McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall has taken over Silver Burdett, Houghton Mifflin has
absorbed D.C. Heath, Harcourt Brace now owns Holt, Rinehart. In the late 1980s, some twenty
publishers were producing social studies textbooks; last year there were only five competing
for the latest Texas adoption. This has increased the tendency toward homogeneity and
intensified the search for a safe, bland book.
Take, for example, this passage on Abraham Lincoln’s first campaign for president in 1860 from
Harcourt Brace’s America’s Story:
Abraham Lincoln ran as a member of the Republican party. He spoke out strongly against the
spread of slavery. He promised not to stop slavery in the South, where it was already practiced.
But he said that he hoped it would one day end there, too.
Many white Southerners worried about what would happen if Lincoln became President. They
thought that the problem was far greater than the question of slavery. They believed that their
whole way of life was being attacked. Some said that their states would secede from the Union
if Lincoln was elected.
In these short and didactic sentences, Lincoln is described as “speaking out strongly,” but the
paragraph about his doing so quotes no such language; its four sentences are carefully paired
with four equally cautious ones giving the South’s view.
As one might expect from such examples, textbooks are now routinely scanned by computer
programs, which measure sentence and paragraph length and also hunt down exotic words
that are thought to be too difficult for the average ten- or eleven-year-old. The widely used
Dale-Chall “readability” tests exclude words such as “treatment,” “protection,” “preparation,”
and “sharpen,” even though the words “treat,” “protect,” “prepare,” and “sharp” are allowed.
This process began in the 1930s when an educational psychologist, Edward Lee Thorndike,
compiled a list of words and the frequencies with which they occurred in everyday American
life. Textbook publishers began to test their books with the Thorndike list and a “good” score
was one in which the fewest number of difficult words appeared. James Michener, who
worked as a textbook editor at Macmillan, describes the consequences wreaked by the
Thorndike list in his book, This Noble Land: My Vision for America:
We editors worked under the tyranny of that list, and we even boasted in the promotional
literature for our textbooks that they conformed to the Thorndike List. In my opinion, however,
this was the beginning of the continuing process known as “dumbing down the curriculum.”
Before Thorndike, I had helped publish a series of successful textbooks in which I had used a
very wide vocabulary, but when I was restricted by Thorndike, what I had once helped write
as a book suitable for students in the sixth grade gradually became a book intended for
grades seven through eight. Texts originally for the middle grades began to be certified as
being appropriate for high school students, and what used to be a high school text appeared
as a college text. The entire educational process was watered down, level by level.
Before we bemoan the decline of American history textbooks, however, we must recall how
biased almost all children’s history books were until about thirty years ago. A look through a
few dozen of the most popular grade school texts in use during the last hundred and twenty
years shows there was never a golden age of textbooks. While some of the books published
since the late nineteenth century are clearly written and a few can even be read with
pleasure today, practically all of them are openly biased and extremely narrow in their
historical range. Many barely mention the Spanish exploration of South and North America
and jump right to the arrival of the English in Jamestown. The Indians are often referred to as
“savages” who had to be removed in order to make way for civilization. Some books took a
tolerant view of slavery, portraying Reconstruction as a time of black corruption and disorder,
and praising the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Even the books that take a clear stand against slavery, the slaughter of American Indians, or
the exclusion of women from public life rarely allow members of those groups to speak for
themselves. Frederick Douglass, Tecumseh, and Harriet Tubman are rarely seen and almost
never heard from. Political correctness used to favor a version of history in which oppressed
minorities hardly figured; now it calls for a greater variety of historical actors, with a slight
advantage given to the groups that were traditionally left out of previous histories. History
books tended to get better in the 1950s and 1960s, and some of the books of the last twenty-
five years, particularly for older students, are surprisingly good. They take account of the civil
rights and women’s movements, and present what most people today would consider a much
more balanced account of history, while including fairly substantial historical narratives.
By the 1990s, however, concerns about political correctness along with the demand for shorter
texts combined to produce thin and distorted versions of history that in their one-sidedness are
mirror opposites of the old racist texts. The standard histories of the Jacksonian Age, for
example, tended to play down his brutal treatment of the Indians and had much to say about
Jackson’s attack on the National Bank, the creation of the spoils system, the Nullification Act,
and the crisis over states’ rights. Now, in the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill book for fifth-grade
students, the entire Jackson era is treated in just 160 lines, 118 of which are dedicated to the
expulsion of the Indians from Georgia and the “Trail of Tears.”
The chapter on the Civil War in Harcourt Brace’s history book, “The Long Road to a Union
Victory,” begins with a section on “African Regiments” before introducing General Ulysses S.
Grant. While it is certainly important to point out the long-neglected contribution of African-
American troops to the union cause—38,000 of whom lost their lives—their military service,
through no fault of their own, came relatively late in the war and can’t be understood without
some knowledge of such major events as Grant’s victories at Vicksburg and Fort Donelson.
In the account of the Boston Massacre given by all four of the standard textbooks submitted
in Texas, the principal historical figure is Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, rather than Samuel
Adams, Paul Revere, or John Adams. A dark-skinned man of mixed descent, part black, part
American Indian, Attucks was indeed killed at the Boston Massacre. That a black man was
among the first to die in the American Revolution is certainly worth attention; so is the fact that
he had been ignored by previous textbooks. But the heavy emphasis on Crispus Attucks to the
neglect of other important figures in all the new standard textbooks is a classic example of the
current tendency to political orthodoxy and homogeneity.
3.
In the sorry state of current textbooks the achievement of Joy Hakim’s A History of US is all the
more impressive. Hakim set out to write a series of books that would combine the best qualities
of the earlier narrative histories with modern historical research. Convinced that history is
inherently fascinating, she fills her books with anecdotes, quotations, humor, and well-
described characters. Instead of talking down to children in simplified language, her books
invite children to make an effort.
For example, Hakim describes Columbus’s voyage—one of the standard features of all
textbooks—with a few vivid details.
In mid-September they come to what seems to be a meadow of grass in the middle of the
ocean. It is the Sargasso Sea—an area of thick, green seaweed. The sailors have never seen
anything like this. They are afraid the ships will get tangled in the green muck. But soon they
are out of it and into the open sea again…. The sea seems endless. On October 9 they say
they will go no farther. Columbus pleads for three more days of sailing. Then, he says, if they
don’t see land they may cut off his head and sail home in peace.
Hakim’s description, closely based on Columbus’s own account, gives some sense of the terror
and wonder of people making an uncharted voyage into an unknown world, and it avoids
the mechanical recitation of names and dates that pervades in the other texts.
“Hakim has a feel for the ‘differentness’ of the past, that makes it real, and she conveys this
through use of original documents,” says Gordon Wood, a professor of early American history
at Brown University. It is precisely this sense of differentness that one potential publisher
objected to when he tried to get her to remove from her book the account she quotes by a
survivor of Magellan’s voyage, who wrote that the crew ate biscuits that smelled like rat urine:
We were three months and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh food. We ate biscuit,
which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuit swarming with worms, for they had eaten
the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats…And of the rats…some of us could not get
enough.
These are the kinds of concrete details that are likely to make history interesting to a ten-year-
old child. But had Hakim not been the sole author of the series, she would not have been able
to resist the pressure to remove the offending passage.
Here is part of Hakim’s account of one of the early Spanish expeditions to Florida in search of
the legendary cities of gold:
They were led by a one-eyed, red-bearded conquistador named Panfilo de Narvaez. Narvaez
was rich, disorganized, and horribly cruel. He had lost his eye fighting Cortés. Narvaez marched
his men up the west coast of Florida…. Indians “playing flutes of reed” serenaded the explorers.
It was a traditional form of greeting. But Narvaez was no music lover. He had a few hundred
Indians killed—for no special reason. Then he forced some Indians to take him into the interior
of the land.
Hakim later describes the Spanish expedition’s disastrous departure:
The Indians were waiting for the right moment. It came when the conquistadors were in deep
water crossing a lake. Poisoned arrows rained down upon them. The sharp arrows cut right
through their suits of woven chain mail.
The surviving Spaniards couldn’t find their ships. They were starving and desperate. So they built
five boats. Then they ate their horses, made the horsehide into water bottles and sails, and
pushed off. Since they didn’t know much about boat-building, most of their boats sank.
Hakim uses the distinctive details of historical experience—the one-eyed conquistador, the
men eating the horses and using their hides as sails—to suggest both the extraordinary cruelty
of the conquistadors and the considerable bravery they showed in the face of appalling
dangers. By contrast, here is the anemic account of the same Florida expedition in Houghton
Mifflin’s Build Our Nation:
In 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez went to Florida looking for the Seven Cities. He left Cuba with an
army of 400 men.
Native Americans in Florida defended themselves. They ambushed, or attacked by surprise,
the army as it crossed a lake. In the end, only four people escaped. These men lived with the
Yakui Indians and other groups for years before they were able to return to Mexico.
The second paragraph is confusing in its very simple-mindedness. Perhaps because of the lack
of space and a concern to avoid saying that the Spaniards actually murdered several
hundreds of Indians on their arrival, the authors simply write that “Native Americans defended
themselves,” without indicating what they were defending themselves against.
Hakim is also the only recent textbook writer not to make Crispus Attucks the hero of the Boston
Massacre. She chooses to concentrate on the different activities and ideas of Samuel Adams
and John Adams. Samuel Adams gave a distorted account of the incident in pamphlets in
order to promote the cause of revolution while John Adams insisted on defending in court the
British soldiers who fired on a rioting crowd, and he won them an acquittal. Both believed in
the cause of revolution, but John Adams wanted to make the point that the revolution must
be based on the rule of law and not mob justice. Hakim describes what each of them did
simply and elegantly and she manages to make a subtle point about deconstructing a
historical myth, without being disrespectful to either Adams.
Hakim avoids the new hagiography of Crispus Attucks because she feels he had a part in
provoking the massacre; but her books, in fact, contain many other important black historical
figures. She not only devotes a chapter to Frederick Douglass and his struggle against slavery
but describes in later chapters his principled defense of women’s rights and his opposition to
the United States’ war with Mexico. Thus Douglass emerges not simply as a runaway slave and
abolitionist but as a leader of moral and political stature who understood that the opposition
to slavery was part of the larger cause of freedom and human rights.
Well before the recent Steven Spielberg film, Hakim had a chapter on the Amistad revolt,
which is unmentioned in any of the other textbooks (although we can now expect it will be
virtually obligatory). Yet Hakim’s book also has a sense of proportion often lacking in the
standard textbooks. For example, in virtually all books dealing with the Lewis and Clark
expedition, it has become the norm to concentrate on their female Native American
translator, Sacagawea, and to mention the presence of a lone black man in the group. But
the accounts are so skimpy that the purpose of the explorers gets lost and the mention of the
African-American slave appears gratuitous. According to Houghton Mifflin’s Build Our Nation:
Lewis and Clark set out from the frontier outpost of St. Louis in May 1804. About 40 men went
with them, including an enslaved African American named York. In addition to trying to find a
water route across the continent, their goal was to learn more about the land, plants, animals,
and people of the West.
York is not mentioned again, so it is unclear why he is mentioned at all. Hakim’s chapter on
Lewis and Clark instead concentrates on the main purpose of the expedition—exploring the
flora and fauna of the American West—and she conveys the excitement of their discoveries.
Then, after several pages describing the explorers’ findings, she writes about the black member
of the expedition; but when she does so, we have a strong sense of the impression he made.
A man named York was an important member of the Lewis and Clark team. York was Clark’s
black slave. He was taller than six feet and an excellent swimmer, hunter, and trapper. The
Indians were awed by York; most had never seen a black man before. Indian warriors often
painted their bodies with charcoal. It was a mark of success in battle. So when they saw strong,
charcoal-skinned York they thought him the mightiest of men. (York was freed when the
expedition returned home. He headed back west and is said to have become chief of an
Indian tribe.)
Even though Hakim’s books can be read by young children, they are surprisingly sophisticated
in suggesting the complexity of moral choices. She points out, for example, that George
Mason of Virginia refused to sign the Constitution because it didn’t prohibit the slave trade; but
he still remained a life-long slave owner, while South Carolina’s John Rutledge argued at the
Constitutional Convention in favor of slavery—and then went home and quietly freed his
slaves.
Hakim had a difficult time getting her book printed and distributed. All of the major textbook
publishers, while praising it highly, said that it didn’t fit neatly enough into the textbook format.
It was soon apparent that they did not want someone else’s new textbook competing with
their own. In many ways, moreover, Hakim’s book threatens the entire textbook industry.
Publishing companies invest several million dollars in a textbook, employing dozens of writers,
consultants, and art directors; that a grandmother from Virginia could do something superior
at a fraction of the cost calls into question their entire system. Eventually, Oxford University Press
agreed to publish her books, contracting to distribute them through the textbook publisher
D.C. Heath. After A History of US was published, Heath was bought by Houghton Mifflin, the
biggest history textbook publisher. Houghton had its own competing textbook and made
virtually no effort to distribute Hakim’s. She and Oxford sued Houghton for antitrust violation in
a suit that explicitly raised the issue of the growing concentration in the textbook industry.
Moreover, the book has had some difficulties in breaking through the state “adoption” process.
Of the five American history books presented for adoption in Texas, A History of US was the
only one rejected. The reason, officially, is that because her texts were published in ten shorter
volumes rather than one comprehensive one, they didn’t fit the state’s technical criteria. An
organized letter-writing campaign to the Texas Education Authority denounced the books as
“unpatriotic” and “socialistic.” But the books have been adopted in traditionally conservative
states such as Tennessee and Virginia, whose education officials say they want to go back to
the basic skills of reading and writing. They are even widely used by religious conservatives
who teach their children at home and are anxious to give them more substantial material than
they get in their local public schools. The books have also been used successfully both in inner-
city public schools in several cities and in such private institutions as Brearley and St. Bernard’s
in New York.
Although Oxford originally printed only 8,000 copies of each volume, the History of US books
have now sold about one million copies.[2] Hakim often receives fan letters from student-
readers—something that is almost inconceivable for a standard textbook author. The
remarkable success of her books shows that many children are starving for good storytelling
and real history. And by showing the economic as well as the literary value of having a single
author, A History of US suggests a possible way out of the dead end in which the textbook
industry finds itself.
It is true that the series has only a small share of a market dominated by a few very large
textbook companies. But the publishing conglomerates emerging from the latest round of
mergers may turn out to be dinosaurs on the way to becoming extinct. Many teachers I talked
to at the 1997 National Conference of Social Studies in Cincinnati said they were dissatisfied
with standard textbooks and that they preferred to make use of various different books and
sources to teach their courses. More than a few told me that they are making increased use
of the Internet, on which there are a number of worthwhile American history sites. The
decentralized Internet could encourage some teachers to move away from the highly
centralized textbook format. But it would be foolish to be overly optimistic. The current
infatuation with CD-ROMs and other high-tech gadgetry could simply raise the cost of
textbooks, favor big publishers, and further increase the dominance of image over text, at the
expense of history.
Notes
[1] “Could Textbooks Be Better Written and Would It Make a Difference?” American Educator,
Spring 1986.
[2] A revised eleven-volume edition with color is to be published in October.
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The Betrayal of History
By Alexander Stille
A History of US
by Joy Hakim
Build Our Nation
America’s Story
Our United States
United States: Adventures in Time and Space
1.
2.
3.
Notes
1
THE NEW SLAVERY
THE FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE IN SUMMER lives up to its reputation. As we sit out
doors in little village about one hundred miles from Paris, the breeze
brings us the scent of apples from the orchard next door.
I
have come
here to meet Seba, a newly freed slave. She is a handsome and ani
mated young woman of twenty-two, but as she tells me her story she
draws into herself, smoking furiously, trembling, and then the tears
come.
I was raised by my grandmother in Mali, and when I was still a little
girl a woman my family knew came and asked her if she could take me
to Paris to care for her children, She told my grandmother that she would
put me in school and that I would learn French. But when I came to Paris
I was not sent to school, I had to work every day. In their house I did all
the work; I cleaned the house, cooked the meals, cared for the children,
and washed and fed the baby. Every day I started work before 7 A.M. and
finished about I I P.M.; I never had a day off My mistress did nothing;
she slept late and then watched television or went out.
One day I told her that I wanted to go to school. She replied that she
had not brought me to France to go to school but to take care of her chil
dren. I was so tired and run-down. I had problems wit
h
my teeth; some
times my cheek would swell and the pain would be terrible. Sometimes
0
2 / THE NEW SLAVERY
J had stomachaches, but when I was ill I still had to work. Sometimes
when I was in pain I would cry, but my mistress would shout at me.
I slept on the floor in one of the children� bedrooms; my food was their
leftovers. I was not allowed to take food from the refrigerator like the
children. IfI took food she would beat me. She often beat me. She would
slap me all the time. She beat me with the broom, with kitchen tools,
or whipped me with electric cable. Sometimes I would bleed; I still have
marks on my body.
Once in 1992 I was late going to get the children from school; my mis
tress and her husband were furious with me and beat and then threw me
out on the street. I had nowhere to go; I didn’t understand anything, and
I wandered on the streets. After some time her husband found me and took
me back to their house. There they stripped me naked, tied my hands be
hind my back, and began to whip me with a wire attached to a broomstick.
Both of them were beating me at the same time. I was bleeding a lot and
screaming, but they continued to beat me. Then she rubbed chili pepper
into my wounds and stuck it in my vagina. I lost consciousness.
Sometime later.one of the children came and untied me. I lay on the
floor where they had left me for several days. The pain was terrible but
no one treated my wounds. When I was able to stand I had to start work
again, but after this I was always locked in the apartment. They contin
ued to beat me.
Seba was finally freed when a neighbor, after hearing the sounds
of abuse and beating, managed to talk to her. Seeing her scars and
C
wounds, the neighbor called the police and the French Committee
against Modern Slavery (CCEM), who brought a case and took Seba
into their care. Medical examinations confirmed that she had been
tortured.
Today Seba is well cared for, living with a volunteer family. She is re
ceiving counseling and is learning to read and write. Recovery will take
years, but she is a remarkably strong young woman. What amazed me
was how far Seba still needs to go. As we talked I realized that though
she was twenty-two and intelligent, her understanding of the world was
to draw a person. This was the result:
THE NEW SLAVERY / 3
less developed than the average :five-year-old’s. For example, until she
was freed she had little understanding of time-no knowledge of weeks,
months, or years. For Seba there was only the endless round of work
and sleep. She knew that there were hot days and cold days, but never
learned that the seasons follow a pattern. If she ever knew her birthday
she had forgotten it, and she did not know her age. She is baffled by the _
idea of “choice.” Her volunteer family tries to help her make choices,
but she still can’t grasp it. I asked Seba to draw the· best picture of a per
son that she could. She told me it was the first time she had ever tried
If Seba’s case were unique it would be shocking enough, but Seba is
one of perhaps 3,000 household slaves in Paris. Nor is such slavery
unique to that city. In London, New York, Zurich, Los Angeles, and
across the world, children are brutalized as household slaves. And they
are just one small group of the world’s slaves.
Slavery is not a horror safely consigned to the past; it continues to
exist throughout the world, even in developed countries like France
and the United States. Across the world slaves work and sweat and
build and suffer. Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are
wearing and the carpet you stand on. Slaves in the Caribbean may have
l
4 / THE NEW SLAVERY
put sugar in your kitchen and ·toys in the hands of your children. In
India they may have sewn the shirt on your back and polished the ring
on your finger. They are paid nothing.
Slaves touch your life indirectly as well. They made the bricks for
the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil slaves made the
charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and
the blade on your lawnmower. Slaves grew the rice that fed the woman
that wove the lovely cloth you’ve put up as curtains. Your investment
portfolio and your mutual fund pension own stock in companies using
slave labor in the developing world. Slaves keep your costs low and re
turns on your investments high.
Slavery is a booming business and the number of slaves is increasing.
People get rich by using slaves. And when they’ve finished with their
slaves, they just throw these people away. This is the new slavery,
which focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning
people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about controlling
them completely. People become completely disposable tools for mak
mg money.
On more than ten occasions I woke early in the morning to find the corpse
of a young girl floating in the water by the barge. Nobody bothered to bury
the girls. They just threw their bodies in the river to be eaten by the fish. 1
This was the fate of young girls enslaved as prostitutes in the gold
mining towns of the Amazon, explained Antonia Pinto, who worked
there as a cook and a procurer. While the developed world bemoans
the destruction of the rain forests, few people realize that slave labor is
used to destroy them. Men are lured to the region by promises of
riches in gold dust, and girls as young as eleven are offered jobs in the
offices and restaurants that serve the mines. When they arrive in the
remote mining areas, the men are locked up and forced to work in
the mines; the girls are beaten, raped, and put to work as prostitutes.
Their “recruitment agents” are paid a small amount for each body,
THE NEW SLAVERY / 5
perhaps $150. The “recruits” have become slaves-not through legal
ownership, but through the final authority of violence. The local police
act as enforcers to control the slaves. As one young woman explained,
“Here the brothel owners send the police to beat us … if we flee they
go after us, if they find us they kill us, or if they don’t kill us they beat
us all the way back to the brothel. “2
The brothels are incredibly lucrative. The girl who “cost” $150 can
be sold for sex up to ten times a night and bring in $10,000 per month.
The only expenses are payments to the police and a pittance for food. If
a girl is a troublemaker, runs away, or gets sick, she is easy to get rid
of and replace. Antonia Pinto described what happened to an eleven
year-old girl when she refused to have sex with a miner: “After decapi
tating her with his machete, the miner drove around in his speedboat,
showing off her head to the other miners, who clapped and shouted
their approval. “3
As the story of these girls shows, slavery has not, as most of us have.
been led to believe, ended. To be sure, the word slavery continues to be
used to mean all sorts of things, 4 and all too often it has been applied as
an easy metaphor. Having just enough money to get by, receiving
wages that barely keep you alive, may be called wage slavery, but it is
not slavery. Sharecroppers have a hard life, but they are not slaves.
Child labor is terrible, but it is not necessarily siavery.
We might think slavery is a matter of ownership, but that depends
on what we mean by ownership. In the past, slavery entailed one person
legally owning another person, but modern slavery is different. Today
slavery is illegal everywhere, and there is no more legal ownership of
human beings. When people buy slaves today they don’t ask for a re
ceipt or 0WI1ership papers, but they do gain control-and they use vio
lence to maintain this control. Slaveholders have all of the benefits of
ownership without the legalities. Indeed, for the slaveholders, not hav
ing legal ownership is an improvement because they get total control
without any responsibility for what they own. For that reason I tend to
use the term slaveholder instead of slaveowner.
– _,. .. ,·
6 I THE NEW SLAVERY
In spite of this difference between the new and the old slavery, I
think everyone would agree that what I am talking about is slavery: the
total control of one person by another for the purpose of economic ex
ploitation. Modern slavery hides behind different masks, using clever
lawyers and legal smoke screens, but when we strip away the lies, we
find someone controlled by violence and denied all of their personal
freedom to make money for someone else. As I traveled around the
world to study the new slavery, I looked behind the legal masks and I
saw people in chains. Of course, many people think there is no such
thing as slavery anymore, and I was one of those people just a few
years ago.
First Come. First Served
I first encountered the vestiges of the old slavery when I was four years
old. What happened is one of my strongest memories. It was the 1950s
in the American South and my family “was having dinner in a cafeteria.
As we started down the serving line I saw another family standing be
hind a chain, waiting as others moved through with their trays. With
the certainty of a four-year-old, I knew that they had arrived first and
should be ahead of us. The fairness of first come, first served had been
drummed into me. So I unhooked the chain and said, “You were here
first, you should go ahead.” The father of this African American family
looked down at me with eyes full of feeling, just as my own father
came up and put his hand on my shoulder. Suddenly the atmosphere
was thick with unspoken emotion. Tension mixed with bittersweet ap
proval as both fathers grappled with the innocent ignorance of a child
who had never heard of segregation. No one spoke, until finally the
black father said, “That’s OK, we’re waiting on someone; go ahead.”
My parents were not radicals, but they had taught me the value of
fairness and equal” treatment. They believed that the idea of our equal
ity was one of the best things about America, and they never approved
THE NEW SLAVERY / 7
of the racism of segregation. But sometimes it takes a child’s simplicity
to cut through the weight of custom. The intensity of that moment
stayed with me, though it was years before I began to understand what
those two sets of parents were feeling. As I grew up I was glad to see
such blatant segregation coming to an end. The idea that there might
still be actual slavery-quite apart from segregation-never crossed
my mind. Everyone knew that in the United States slavery had ended
in 1865.
Of course, the gross inequalities in American society brought the
slavery of the past to mind. I realized that the United States, once a
large-scale slave society, was still suffering from a botched emancipa
tion program. Soon after Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated proclamation,
Jim Crow laws and oppression took over to keep ex-slaves from eco
nomic and political power. I came to understand that emancipation
was a process, not an event-a process that still had a way to go. As a
young social researcher, I generally held jobs concerned with the residue
of this unfinished process: I studied bad housing, health differences be
tween the races, problems in integrated schools, and racism in the legal
system. But I still saw all this as the vestiges of slavery, as problems that
were tough but not intractable.
It was o.cly after I _moved to England in the early 1980s that I be
came aware of real slavery. At a large public event I came across a small
table set up by_ Anti-Slavery International. I picked up some leaflets in
passing, and I was amazed by what I read. There was no flash-of-light
experience, but I developed a gnawing desire to find out more. I was
perplexed that this most fundamental human right was still not as
sured-and that no one seemed to know or care about it. Millions of
people were actively working against the nuclear threat, against apart
heid in South Africa, against famine in Ethiopia, yet slavery wasn’t even
on the map. The more this realization dug into me, the more I knew
I had to do something. Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing
someone’s labor; it is the theft of an entire life. It is more closely related
to the concentration camp than to questions of bad working conditions.
8 / THE NEW SLAVERY
There seems nothing to debate about slavery: it must stop. My ques
tion became: What can I do to bring an end to slavery? I decided to use
my skills as a social researcher, and I embarked on the project that led
to this book.
How Many Slaves?
For several years I collected every scrap of information I could find
about modern slavery. I went to the United Nations and the British Li
brary; I trawled through the International Labour Office and visited
human rights organizations and charities. I talked to anthropologists
and economists. Getting useful, reliable information on slavery is very
difficult. Even when shown photographs and affidavits, nations’ officials
deny its existence. Human rights organizations, in contrast, want to
expose the existence of slavery. They report what they are told by the
victims of slavery, and it is their business to counter government denials
with evidence of widespread slavery. Who and what can we beli�ve?
My approach was to pull together all the evidence I could find,
country by country. When someone gave reasons why a number of
people were in slavery, I took note. When two people independently
stated they had good reasons to think that there was a certain amount
of slavery, I began to feel more convinced. Sometimes I found that re
searchers were working on slavery in two different parts of the same
country without knowing about each other. I looked at every report I
could find and asked, “\Vhat can I feel sure about? Which numbers do
I trust?” Then I added up what I had found, taking care to be conserva
tive. If I had any doubts about a report, I left it out of my calculations.
It’s important to remember that slavery is a shadowy, illegal enterprise,
so statistics are hard to come by. I can only make a good guess at the
numbers.
My best estimate of the number of slaves in the world today is 2 7 million.
This number is much smaller than the estimates put forward by some
activists, who give a range as high as 200 million, but it is the number I
THE NEW SLAVERY / 9
feel I can trust; it is also the number that fits my strict definition of slav
ery. The biggest part of that 2 7 million, perhaps r 5 to 20 million, is
represented by bonded labor in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal.
Bonded labor or debt bondage happens when people give themselves
into slavery as security against a loan or when they inherit a debt from a
relative (we’ll look at this more closely later). Otherwise slavery tends
to be concentrated in Southeast Asia, northern and western Africa, and
parts of South America (but there are some slaves in almost every coun
try in the world, including the United States, Japan, and many Euro
pean countries). There are more slaves alive today than all the peo
ple stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Put
another way, today’s slave population is greater than the population of
Cariada, and six times greater than the population of Israel.
These slaves tend to be used in simple, nontechnological, and tradi
tional work. The largest group work in agriculture. But slaves are used
in many other kinds of labor: brickmaking, mining or quarrying, pros
titution, gem working and jewelry making, cloth and carpet making,
and domestic service; they clear forests, make charcoal, and work in
shops. Much of this work is aimed at local sale and consumption, but
slave-made goods reach into homes around the world. Carpets, fire
works, jewelry, and metal.goods made by slave labor, as well as grains,
sugar, and other foods harvested by slaves, are imported directly to
North America and Europe. In addition, large international corpora
tions, acting through subsidiaries in the developing world, take advan
tage of slave labor to improve their bottom line and increase the divi
dends to their shareholders.
But the value of slaves lies not so much in the particular products
they make as in their sweat, in the volume of work squeezed out of
them. Slaves are often forced to sleep next to their looms or brick
kilns; some are even chained to their work tables. All their waking
hours may be turned into working hours. In our global economy one of
the standard explanations that multinational corporations give for clos
ing factories in the “first world” and opening them in the “third world”
10 / THE NEW SLAVERY
is the lower labor cost. Slavery can constitute a significant part of these
savings. No paid workers, no matter how efficient, can compete eco
nomically with unpaid workers-slaves.
What Does Race Have to Do with It?
In the new slavery race means little. In the past, ethnic and racial dif
ferences were used to explain and excuse slavery. These differences al
lowed slaveholders to make up reasons why slavery was acceptable, or
even a· good thing for the slaves. The otherness of the slaves made it
easier to employ the violence and cruelty necessary for total control.
This otherness could be defined in almost any way-a different reli
gion, tribe, skin color, language, custom, or economic class. Any of these
differences could be and were used to separate the slaves from the
slaveholders. Maintaining these differences required tremendous in
vestment in some very irrational ideas-and the crazier the justifying
idea, the more vehemently it was insisted upon. The American Found
ing Fathers had to go through moral, linguistic, and political contor
tions to explain why their “land of the free” was only for white people. 5
Many of them knew that by allowing slavery they were betraying their
most cherished ideals. They were driven to it because slavery was
worth a lot of money to a lot of people in North America at the time.
But they went to the trouble of devising legal and political excuses be
cause they felt they had to justify their economic decisions morally.
Today the morality of money overrides other concerns. Most slave
holders feel no need to explain or defend their chosen method of labor
recruitment and management. Slavery is a very profitable business, and
a good bottom line is justification enough. Freed of ideas that restrict
the status of slave to others, modern slaveholders use other criteria to
choose slaves. Indeed, they enjoy a great advantage: being able to en
slave people from one’s own country helps keep costs down. Slaves in
the American South in the nineteenth century were very expensive, in
THE NEW SLAVERY / 11
part because they originally had to be shipped thousands of miles from
Africa. When slaves can be gotten from the next town or region, trans
portation costs fall. The question isn’t “Are they the right color to be
slaves?” but “Are they vulnerable enough to be enslaved?” The criteria
of enslavement today do not concern color, tribe, or religion; they fo
cus on weakness, gull_ibility, and deprivation.
It is true that in some countries there are ethnic or religious differ
ences between slaves and slaveholders. In Pakistan, for example, many
enslaved brickmakers are Christians while the slaveholders are Mus
lim. In India slave and slaveholder may be from different castes. In
Thailand they may come from different regions of the country and are
much more likely to be women. But in Pakistan there are Christians
who are not slaves, in India members of the same caste who are free.
Their caste or religion simply reflects their vulnerability to enslavement;
it doesn’t cause it. Only in one country, Mauritania, does the racism of
the old slavery persist-there black slaves are held by Arab slavehold
ers, and race is a key division. To be sure, some cultures are more di
vided along racial lines than others. Japanese culture strongly distin
guishes the Japanese as different from everyone else, and so enslaved
prostitutes in Japan are more likely to be Thai, Philippine, or European
women-although they may be Japanese. Even here, the key differ
ence is not racial but economic: Japanese women are not nearly so vul
nerable and desperate as Thais or Filipinas. And the Thai women are
available for shipment to Japan because Thais are enslaving Thais. The
same pattern occurs in the oil-rich states of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,
where Muslim Arabs promiscuously enslave Sri Lankan Hindus, Fil
ipino Christians, and Nigerian Muslims. The common denominator is
poverty, not color. Behind every assertion of ethnic difference is the
reality of economic disparity. If all left-handed people in the world
became destitute tomorrow, there would soon be slaveholders taking
advantage of them. Modern slaveholders are predators keenly aware
of weakness; they are rapidly adapting an ancient practice to the new
global economy.
1 2 / THE NEW SLAVERY
The Rise of the New Slavery
For thousands of years people have been enslaved. Slavery echoes
through the great epics of the distant past. Ancient Egypt, ancient
Greece, and the Roman Empire all made slavery integral to their social
systems.6 Right through the American and Brazilian slave economies of
the last century, legal, old-style slavery persisted in what is now called
the developed world. But slavery never disappeared; instead, it took a
different form. The basic fact of one person totally controlling another
remains the same, but slavery has changed in some crucial ways.
Two factors are critical in the shift from the old slavery to the explo
sive spread of the new. The first is the dramatic increase in world pop
ulation following World War IL Since 1945 the world population has
almost tripled, increasing from about 2 billion people to more than
5. 7 billion. The greatest growth has been in those countries where slav
ery is most prevalent today. Across Southeast Asia, the Indian subconti
nent, Africa, and the Arab countries, populations have more than tripled
and countries are flooded with children. Over half the population in
some of these countries is under the age of fifteen. In countries that
were already poor, the sheer weight of numbers overwhelms the re
sources at hand. Without work and with increasing fear as resources di
minish, people become desperate and life becomes cheap. Especially in
those areas where slavery had persisted or was part of the historical
culture, the population explosion radically increased the supply of po
tential slaves and drove down their price.
The second crucial factor is that at the same time that the popula
tion was exploding, these countries were undergoing rapid social and
economic change. In many developing countries modernization brought
immense wealth to the elite and continued or increased the impover
ishment of the poor majority. Throughout Africa and Asia the last fifty
years have been scarred by civil war and the wholesale looting of re
sources by home-grown dictators, often supported by one of the super
powers. To hold on to power, the ruling kleptocrats have paid enormous
THE NEW SLAVERY / 13
sums for weaponry, money raised by mortaging their countries. Mean
while traditional ways of life and subsistence have been sacrificed to
the cash crop and quick profit. Poor families have lost their old ways
of meeting a crisis. Traditional societies, while sometimes oppressive,
generally relied on ties of responsibility and kinship that could usually
carry people through a crisis such as the death of the breadwinner, seri
ous illness, or a bad harvest. Modernization and the globalization of the
world economy have shattered these traditional families and the small
scale subsistence farming that supported them. The forced shift from
subsistence to cash-crop agriculture, the loss of common land, and gov
ernment policies that suppress farm income in favor of cheap food for
the cities have all helped bankrupt millions of peasants and drive them
from their land-sometimes into slavery.
Although modernization has had good effects, bringing improve
ments in health care and education, the concentration of land in the
hands of an elite and..its use of land to produce cash crops for export
have made the poor more vulnerable. Because the political elites in the
developing world focus on economic growth, which is not just in their
collective self-interest but required by global financial institutions, little
attention is paid to sustainable livelihoods for the majority. So while the
rich of the developing world have grown richer, the poor have fewer
and fewer options. Amid the disruption of rapid social change, one of
those options is slavery.
The end of the cold war only made matters worse. William Greider
explains it well:
One of the striking qualities of the post-Cold War globalization
is how easily business and government in the capitalist democracies
have abandoned the values they putatively espoused for forty years
during the struggle against communism-individual liberties and
political legitimacy based on free elections. Concern for human
rights, including freedom of assembly for workers wishing to speak
for themselves, has been pushed aside by commercial opportunity.
Multinationals plunge confidently into new markets, from Vietnam
14 / THE NEW SLAVER Y
to China, where governments routinely control and abuse their own
citizens.7
In fact, some of these countries enslave their own citizens, and others
turn a blind eye to the slavery that generates such enormous profits.
TH E O L D SLAVERY V E R S U S T H E N EW S LAVE RY Government corruption,
plus the vast increase in the number of people and their ongoing im
poverishment, has led to the new slavery. For the first time in human
history there is an absolute glut of potential slaves. It is a dramatic il
lustration of the laws of supply and demand: with so many possible
slaves, their value has plummeted. Slaves are now so cheap that they
have become cost-effective in many new kinds of work, completely
changing how they are seen and used. Thinke· about computers. Forty
years ago there were only a handful of computers, and they cost hun
dreds of thousands of dollars ; only big companies and the government
could afford them. Today there are millions of personal computers. Any
one can buy a used, but quite serviceable, model for $ mo. Use that $100
computer for a year or two, and when it breaks down, don’t bother to
fix it-just thr�w it away.
The same thing happens in the new slavery. Buying a slave is no
longer a major investment, like buying a car or a house (as it was in the
old slavery); it is more like buying an inexpensive bicycle or a cheap
computer. Slaveholders get all the work they can out of their slaves, and
then throw them away. The nature of the relationship between slaves
and slaveholders has fundamentally altered. The new disposability has
dramatically increased the amount of profit to be made from a slave,
decreased the length of time a person would normally be enslaved, and
made the question of legal ownership less important. When slaves cost
a great deal of money, that investment had to be safeguarded through
clear and legally documented ownership. Slaves of the past were worth
stealing and worth chasing down if they escaped. Today slaves cost so
little that it is not worth the hassle of securing permanent, “legal”
ownership. Slaves are disposable.
THE NEW SLAVERY / 1 5
Around the world today the length o f time a slave spends in bondage
varies enormously. Where old-style slavery is still practiced, bondage
lasts forever. A Mauritanian woman born into slavery has a good chance
of remaining so for the rest of her life. Her children, if she has any, will
also be slaves, and so on down the generations. But today most slaves
are temporary; some are enslaved for only a few months. It is simply
not profitable to keep them when they are not immediately useful.
Under these circumstances, there is no reason to invest heavily in their
upkeep and indeed little reason to ensure that they survive their en
slavement. While slaves in the American South were often horribly
treated, there was nevertheless a strong incentive to keep them alive for
many years. Slaves were like valuable livestock: the plantation owner
needed to make back his investment. There was also pressure to breed
them and produce more slaves, since it was usually cheaper to raise
new slaves oneself than to buy adults. Today no slaveholder wants to
spend money supporting useless infants, so female slaves, especially
those forced into prostitution, are prevented from conceiving. And there
is· no reason to protect slaves from disease or injury-medicine costs
money, and it’s cheaper to let them die.
The key differences between the old and new slavery break down
like this:
Old Slavery New Slavery
Legal ownership asserted Legal ownership avoided
High purchase cost Very low purchase cost
Low profits Very high profits
Shortage of potential ·slaves Surplus of potential slaves
Long-term relationship Short-term relationship
Slaves maintained Slaves disposable
Ethnic differences important Ethnic differences not important
Looking at a specific example will clarify these differences. Perhaps the
best studied and best understood form of old slavery was the system in
1 & / THE NEW SLAVERY
the American South before 1 860. 8 Slaves were at a premium, and the
demand for them was high because1 European immigrants were able to
find other work or even start their own farms in the ever-expanding
West. This demand for slaves was reflected in their price. By 1 8 5 0 an
average field laborer sold for $ 1 ,000 to $ 1 ,800. This was three to six
times the average yearly wage of an American worker at the time, per
haps equivalent to around $ 5 0,000 to $ 1 00,000 today. Despite their
high cost, slaves generated, on average, profits of only about 5 percent
each year. If the cotton market went up, a plantation owner might
make a very good return on his slaves, but if the price of cotton fell,
he might be forced to sell slaves to stay in business. Ownership was
clearly demonstrated by bills of sale and titles of ownership, and slaves
could be used as collateral for loans or used to pay off debts. Slaves
were often brutalized to keep them under control, but they were also
recognized and treated as sizable investments. A final distinctive ele
ment was the extreme racial differentiation between slaveholder and
slave, so strong that a very small genetic difference-normally set at
being only one-eighth black-still meant lifelong enslavement.9
In comparison, consider the agricultural slave in debt bondage in
India now. There land rather than labor is at a premium today. In- “—-
dia’s population has boomed, currently totaling three times that of the
United States in a country with one-third the space. The glut of poten-
tial workers means that free labor must regularly compete with slave,
and the resulting pressure on agricultural wages pushes free laborers
toward bondage. When free farmers run out of money, when a crop
fails or a member of the family becomes ill and needs medicine, they
have few choices. Faced with a crisis, they borrow enough money from
a local landowner to meet the crisis, but having no other possessions,
they must use their own lives as collateral . The debt against which a
person is bonded-that is, the price of a laborer-might be 5 00 to 1 ,000
rupees (about $ 1 2 to $2 3). The bond is completely open-ended; the
slave must work for the slaveholder until the slaveholder decides the
debt is repaid. It may carry over into a second and third generation,
THE NEW SLAVERY / 1 7
growing under fraudulent accounting b y the slaveholder, who may also
seize and sell the children of the bonded laborer against the debt. The
functional reality is one of slavery, but its differences from the old slav
ery reflect five of the seven points listed above.
First, no one tries to assert legal ownership of the bonded laborer.
The slave is held under threat of violence, and often physically locked
up, but no one assert� that he or she is in fact “property.” Second, the
bonded laborer is made responsible for his or her own upkeep, thus
lowering the slaveholder’s costs. The slaves may scrape together their
subsistence in a number of ways: eking it out from the foodstuffs pro
duced for the slaveholder, using their “spare time” to do whatever is
necessary to bring in food, or receiving some foodstuffs or money from
the slaveholder. The slaveholders save by providing no regular main
tenance, and they can cut off food and all support when the bonded la
borer is unable to work or is no longer needed.
Third, if a bonded laborer is not able to work, perhaps because of
illness or injury, or is not needed for work, he or she can be abandoned
or disposed of by the slaveholder, who bears no responsibility for the
slave’s upkeep. Often the slaveholder keeps an entirely fraudulent legal
document, which the bonded laborer has “signed” under duress. This
document violates several current Indian laws and relies on others that
either never existed or have not existed for decades, yet it is normally
used to justify holding the bonded laborer. It also excuses the aban
donment of ill or injured slaves, for it specifies responsibilities only on
the part of the bonded laborer; there are none on the part of the slave
holder. Fourth, the ethnic differentiation is not nearly so rigid as that of
the old slavery. As already noted, bonded laborers may well belong to a
lower caste than the slaveholder-but this is not always the case. The
key distinction lies in wealth and power, not caste.
Finally, a major difference between the old and new slavery is in the
profits produced by an enslaved laborer. Agricultural bonded laborers
in India generate not 5 percent, as did slaves in the American South,
but over 50 percent profit per year for the slaveholder. This high profit
1 8 / THE NEW SLAVERY ·
is due, in part, to the low cost of the slave (i.e., the small loan ad
vanced), but even so it reflects the low returns on old-fashioned small
scale agriculture: indeed, almost all other forms of modern slavery are
much more profitable.
Agricultural debt bondage in India still has some characteristics of
the old slavery, such as the holding of slaves for long periods. A better
example of the new slavery is provided by the young women lured into
“contract” slavery and put to work in prostitution in Thailand. A popu
lation explosion in Thailand has ensured a surplus of potential slaves,
while rapid economic change has led to new poverty and desperation.
The girls are often initially drawn from rural areas with the promise of
work in restaurants or factories. There is no ethnic difference-these
are Thai girls enslaved by Thai brothel owners; the distinction between
them, if any, is that the former are rural and the latter urban. The girls
might be sold by their parents to a broker, or tricked by an agent; once
away from their homes they are brutalized and enslaved, then sold to
a brothel owner. The brothel owners place the girls in debt bondage
and tell them they must pay back their purchase price, plus interest,
through prostitution. They might use the _ _ legal ruse of a contract
which often specifies some completely unrelated job, such as factory
work-but that isn’t usually necessary. The cakulation of the debt and
the interest is, of course, completely in the hands of the brothel owners
and so is manipulated to show whatever they like. Using that trick,
they can keep a girl as long as they want, and they don’t need to dem
onstrate any legal ownership. The brothel does. have to feed the girl
and keep her presentable, but if she becomes ill or injured or too old,
she is disposed of. In Thailand today, the girl is often discarded when
she tests positive for HIV
This form of contract debt bondage is extremely profitable. A girl
between twelve and fifteen years old can be purchased for $800 to
$2 ,000, and the costs of running a brothel and feeding the girls are rel
atively low. The profit is often as high as 800 percent a year. This kind
THE NEW SLAVERY / 1 9
of return can be made on a girl for five to ten years. After that, espe
cially if she becomes ill or HIV-positive, the girl is dumped.
T H E F O R M S O F T H E N EW S LAV E RY Charted on paper in neat categories,
the new slavery seems to be very clear and distinct. In fact, it is as in
conveniently sloppy, dynamic, changeable, and confusing as any other
kind of relation between humans. We can no more expect there to be
one kind of slavery than we can expect there to be one kind of mar
riage. People are inventive and flexible, and the permutations of human
violence and exploitation are infinite. The best we can do with slavery
is to set down its dimensions and then test any particular example
against them.
One critical dimension is violence-all types of slavery depend on
violence, which holds the slave in place. Yet, for one slave, there may be
only the threat of violern::e while, with another, threats may escalate
into terrible abuse. Another dimension is the length of enslavement.
Short-term enslavement is typical of the new slavery, but “short” may
mean ten weeks or ten years. Still another aspect is the slave’s loss of
control over his or her life and ongoing “obligation” to the slaveholder.
The actual way in which this obligation is enforced varies a great deal,
yet it is possible to use this dimension to outline three basic forms of
slavery :
I . Chattel slavery is the form closest to the old slavery. A person is
captured, born, or sold into permanent servitude, and ownership is of
ten asserted. The slave’s children are normally treated as property as
well and can be sold by the slaveholder. Occasionally, these slaves are
kept as items of conspicuous consvmption. This form is most often
found in northern and western Africa and some Arab countries, but it
represents a very small proportion of slaves in the modern world. We
will look at chattel slavery in Mauritania in chapter 3 .
2 . Debt bondage i s the most common form of slavery i n the world. A
20 / THE NEW SLAVERY
person pledges him- or herself against a loan of money, but the length
and nature of the service are not defined and the labor does not reduce
the original debt. The debt can be passed down to subsequent genera
tions, thus enslaving offspring ; moreover, “defaulting” can be punished
by seizing or selling children into further debt bonds. Ownership is
not normally asserted, but there is complete physical control of the
bonded laborer. Debt bondage is most common on the Indian subcon
tinent. We will look at it in Pakistan and India in chapters 5 and 6.
3 . Contract slavery shows how modern labor relations are used to
hide the new slavery. Contracts are offered that guarantee employment,
perhaps in a workshop or factory, but when the workers are taken to
their place of work they find themselves enslaved. The contract is used
as an enticement to trick an individual into slavery, as well as a way
of making the slavery look legitimate. If legal questions are raised, the
contract can be produced, but the reality is that the “contract worker”
is a slave, threatened by violence, lacking any freedom of movement,
and paid nothing. The most rapidly growing form of slavery, this is the
second-largest form today. Contract slavery is most often found in
Southeast Asia, Brazil, some Arab states, and some parts of the Indian
subcontinent. We will look at contract slavery in Thailand and Brazil in
chapters 2 and 4.
These types are not mutually exclusive. Contracts may be issued to
chattel slaves in order to con�eal their enslavement. Girls trapped into
prostitution by debt bondage will sometimes have contracts that specify
their obligations. The important thing to remember is that people are
enslaved by violence and held against their wills for purposes of exploitation.
The categories just outlined are simply a way to help us track the pat
terns of enslavement, to clarify how slavery might be attacked.
A small percentage of slaves fall into a number of other readily
identifiable kinds of slavery. These tend to be specific to particular
geographical regions or political situations. A good example of slav
ery linked to politics is what is often called war slavery; this includes
T HE NEW S LAVERY / 2 1
government-sponsored slavery. In Burma today, there is widespread
capture and enslavement of civilians by the government and the army.
Tens of thousands of men, women, and children are used as laborers or
bearers in military campaigns against indigenous peoples or on govern
ment construction projects. The Burmese military dictatorship doesn’t
suggest that it owns the people it has enslaved-in fact, it denies enslav
ing anyone-but the U.S. State Department and human rights organi
zations confirm that violence is used to hold a large number of people
in bondage. Once again, the motive is economic gain: not to generate
profits but to save transportation or production costs in the war effort,
or labor costs in construction projects. One major project is the natu
ral gas pipeline that Burma is building in partnership with the U.S. oil
company Unocal, the French oil company Total, and the Thai company
PTT Exploration and Production. These three companies are often fea
tured in international and global mutual investment funds. The Thai
company, which is owned in part by the Thai government, is recom
mended by orie mutual fund as a “family” investment. In the pipeline
project thousands of enslaved workers, including old men, pregnant
women, and children, are forced at gunpoint to clear land and build a
railway next to the pipeline. 10 War slavery is unique: this is slavery com
mitted by the government, whereas most slavery happens in spite of the
government.
In some parts of the Caribbean and in western Africa, children are
given or sold into domestic service. They are sometimes called “resta
vecs.” Ownership is not asserted, but strict control, enforced by vio
lence, is maintained over the child. The domestic service? performed
by the enslaved child provide a sizable return on the investment in
“upkeep.” It is a culturally approved way of dealing with “extra” chil
dren; some are treated well, but for most it is a kind of slavery that
lasts until adulthood. 1 1
Slavery can also be linked to religion, as with the Indian devadasi
women we will meet in chapter 6, or the children who are ritual slaves
in Ghana. 12 Several thousand girls and young women are given by their
https://Ghana.12
https://adulthood.11
2 2 / THE NEW SLAVERY
families as slaves to local fetish priests in southeastern Ghana, Togo,
Benin, and southwestern Nigeria. In a custom very alien to Western sen
sibilities the girls are enslaved in order to atone for sins committed by
members oftheir families, often rape. The girls may, in fact, be the prod
ucts of rape, and their slavery is seen as a way of appeasing the gods
for that or other crimes committed by their male relatives. A girl, who
must he a virgin, is given to the local priest as a slave when she is about
ten years old. The girl then stays with the priest-cooking, cleaning,
farming, and serving him sexually-until he frees her, usually after she
has borne several children. At that point the slave’s family must provide
another young girl to replace her. Ghana’s constitution forbids slav
ery, but the practice is justified on religious grounds by villagers and
priests.
As can be seen from these cases, slavery comes in ·many forms.
Moreover, slavery can be found in virtually every country. A recent in
vestigation in Great Britain found young girls held in slavery and forced
to be prostitutes in Birmingham and Manchester. 1 3 Enslaved domes
tic workers have been found and freed in London and Paris. In the
United States farmworkers have been found locked inside barracks and
working under armed guards as field slaves. Enslaved Thai and Philip
pine women have been freed from brothels in New York, Seattle, and
Los Angeles. 14 This list could go on and on. Almost all of the countries
where slavery “cannot” exist have slaves inside their borders-but, it
must be said, in very small numbers compared to the Indian subconti
nent and the Far East. The important point is that slaves constitute a
vast workforce supporting the global economy we all depend upon.
The New Slave ry a n d the Global Economy
Just how much does slave labor contribute to the global economy?
Inevitably, determining the exact contribution of slaves to the world
economy is very difficult because no reliable information is available
https://Angeles.14
https://Manchester.13
L
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THE NEW SLAVERY / 2 3
for most types of slaveiy. Nevertheless, a few rough calculations are
possible.
Agricultural bonded laborers, after an initial loan (think of this as
the purchase price) of around $50, generate up to r oo percent net
profit for the slaveholders. If there are an estimated 18 million such
workers, the annual profit generated would be on the order of $860
million, though this might be distributed to as many as 5 million slave
holders. If 200,000 women and children are enslaved as prostitutes, a
not unreasonable guess, and if the financial breakdown found in Thai
prostitution is used as a guide, then these slaves would generate a total
annual profit ofn$ 1 o. 5 billion.
If these sums are averaged to reflect a world population of 2 7 million
slaves, the total yearly profit generated by slaves would be on the order
ofn$ 13 billion. This is a veiy rough estimate. But we might put this sum
into global perspective by noting that $13 billion is approximately equal
to the amount the Dutch spent last year on tourism, or substantially
less than the personal worth of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Although the direct value of slave labor in the world economy may
seem rehitively small, the indirect value is much greater. For example,
slave-produced charcoal is crucial to making steel in Brazil. Much of
this steel is then made into the cars, car parts, and other metal goods
that make up a quarter of all Brazil’s exports. Britain alone imports
$1.6 billion in goods from Brazil ea�h year, the United States signifi
cantly more. 1 5 Slaveiy lowers a factory’s production costs; these sav
ings can be passed up the economic stream, ultimately reaching shops
of Europe and North America as lower prices or higher profits for re
tailers. Goods directly produced by slaves are also exported, and follow
the same pattern. It is most likely that slave-produced goods and goods
assembled from slave-made components have the effect of increasing
profits rather than just lowering consumer prices, as they are mixed
into the flow of other products. I’d like to believe that most Western
consumers, if they could identify slave-produced goods, would avoid
them despite their lower price. But consumers do look for bargains,
1
2 4 / THE NEW SLAVERY
and they don’t usually stop to ask why a product is so cheap. We have
to face facts: by always looking for the best deal, we may be choosing
slave-made goods without knowing what we are buying. And the im
pact of slavery reverberates through the world economy in ways even
harder to escape. Workers making computer parts or televisions in In
dia can be paid low wages in part because food produced by slave labor
is so cheap. This lowers the cost of the goods they make, and factories
unable to compete with their prices close in North America and Eu
rope. Slave labor anywhere threatens real jobs everywhere.
That slavery is an international economic activity suggests some
thing about the way it is, and the way it isn’t, being combated: there are
almost no economic controls on slaveholding and the slave trade. Con
sider, in contrast, the pursuit of Colombian cocaine barons. Rarely are
these men arrested for making or distributing drugs. Time after time
they are caught for financial wrongdoing-tax avoidance, money laun
dering, or fraud and the falsification of records. In late 1996 one drug
cartel lost $3 6 million, which was confiscated on money-laundering
charges by the U.S.Justice Department. Bringing down criminals by in
vestigating their finances and enforcing economic sanctions has been
shown to be effective, yet these techniques are rarely applied to the
crime of slavery. The power of a great range of organizations-the World
Bank, national regulatory agencies, trade organizations, regional customs
and excise units, individual companies, consumer groups-could be har
nessed to break the profits of slavers. We will look more closely at this
potential in the final chapter. But we need to understand how the new
slavery works if we are going to do anything to stop it.
W H Y B U Y T H E C O W ?- C O N T R O L W IT H O UT O W N’E R S H I P One of the draw
backs of the old slavery was the cost of maintaining slaves who were too
young or too old. Careful analysis of both American cotton plantations
and Brazilian coffee farms in the r Soos shows that the productivity of
slaves was linked to their age. 16 Children did not bring in more than
they cost until the age of ten or twelve, though they were put to work _n
THE NEW SLAVE R Y / 2 5
as early as possible. Productivity and profits to be made from a slave
peaked at about age thirty and fell off sharply when a slave was fifty or
more. Slavery was profitable, but the profitability was diminished by
the cost of keeping infants, small children, and unproductive old peo
ple. The new slavery avoids this extra cost and so increases its profits.
The new slavery mimics the world economy by shifting away from
ownership and fixed asset management, concentrating instead on con
trol and use of resources or processes. Put another way, it is like the
shift from the “ownership” of colonies in the last century to the eco
nomic exploitation of those same countries today without the cost and
trouble of maintaining colonies. Transnational companies today do what
European empires did in the last century-exploit natural resources and
take advantage of low-cost labor-but without needing to take over
and govern the entire country. Similarly, the new slavery appropriates
the economic value of individuals while keeping them under complete
coercive control-but without asserting ownership or accepting re
sponsibility for their survival. The result is much greater economic effi
ciency: useless and unprofitable infants, the elderly, and the sick or in
jured are dumped. Seasonal tasks are met with seasonal enslavement, as
in the case of Haitian sugarcane cutters. 1 7 In the new slavery, the slave
is a consumable item, added to the production process when needed,
but no longer carrying a high capital cost.
This shift from ownership to control and appropriation applies to
virtually all modern slavery across national or cultural boundaries,
whether the slave is cutting cane in the Caribbean, making bricks in the
Punjab, mining in Brazil, or being kept as a prostitute in Thailand.
Mirroring modern economic practice, slavery in this respect is being
transformed from culturally specific forms to an emerging standard
ized or globalized form. The world shrinks through increasingly easy
communication. The slaveholders in Pakistan or Brazil watch television
just like everyone else. When they see that industries in many countries
are switching to a “just in time” system for the delivery of raw materials
or necessary labor, they draw the same conclusions about profitability
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as did those corporations. As jobs for life disappear from the world
economy, so too does slavery for life. The economic advantages of
short-term enslavement far outweigh the costs of buying new slaves
.. when needed.
LEGAL F I CT I O N S Today accepted systems of labor relations are used to
legitimate and conceal slavery. Much modern slavery is hidden behind a
mask of fraudulent labor contracts, which are most common in the
fastest-growing areas of slavery. The contracts have two main uses for
the slaveholder-entrapment and concealment. The use of false con
tracts is part of the globalization of slavery; the basic process of re
cruitment into slavery by fraudulent contract is the same from Brazil to
Thailand. It allows slaves to be taken both into countries where their
enslavement is relatively easily achieved (e.g., Filipinas taken to Saudi
Arabia) and into countries where their enslavement would not nor
mally be allowed. It is estimated, for example, that there are up to I ,ooo
domestic slaves in London, 1 8 all of whom are covered by a contract of
employment and by the recognition of that contract by British immi
gration control staff on their arrival.
False contracts work on several levels. Shown to people desperate
for paid work, these contracts are a powerful incentive to get into the
back of the truck that carries them into slavery. Among the rural poor
of many countries, the well-spoken and well-dressed recruitment agent
with the official and legal-looking document commands attention. As
sured that the contract guarantees good treatment, that it sets clear
legal rights and wages for the worker, the potential slave signs happily
and places him- or herself in the hands of the slaver. After being used to
entice workers into slavery, after bringing them far enough from their
homes that violence can be used to control them, the contract can be
thrown away. But it is more likely that it will be kept, for it has other
uses for the slaveholder.
Since slavery is illegal in all countries, it must be concealed. Even
in places where the police work hand in hand with the slaveholders
r
THE NEW SLAVERY / 2 7
and share in their profits, no one wants to advertise the fact that he or
she is a slaveholder. It may be that local custom and culture support
slavery and that most of the population knows of its existence, but ad
mitting it is something else again. Here false contracts conceal slavery.
Slaveholders can easily force their slaves to sign anything: mortgages,
loan agreements, indentures, or labor contracts. If questions are raised,
signed contracts are produced and corrupt law enforcement looks the
other way. Even in countries with mostly honest and conscientious po
lice, the contracts hide slavery. In Britain, domestic servants brought
into the country depend for their livelihood and immigration status on
their employer, whose name is added to their passport when they en
ter the country ; in other words, the law reinforces the dependence of
the servant on the master. Under a concession in British immigration
law, foreigners moving to or visiting the United Kingdom as well as
returning British nationals have been allowed to bring their domestic
servants. Immigration staff are supposed to make sure that these ser
vants are at least seventeen years old and have been employed as ser
vants for at least a year. Yet the system can readily be abused. Most
of the servants do not speak English and are told how and what they
must answer if questioned by immigration officials. False contracts can
be shown that date employment to more than a year previous. But most
important, none of the existing checks can uncover a slave of long stand
ing, brought as a servant with a family group. Neither do they protect a
servant once he or she is in the country. The story of Laxmi Swami,
taken from Bridget Anderson’s Britain s Secret Slaves, is typical:
Born in India, Laxrni Swami came to Britain via Kuwait under
the Home Office Concession as the servant to two half-sisters of
the Emir of Kuwait. The princesses regularly spent six months
of the year in Bayswater, central London, taking their servants with
them. They subjected these women to extreme cruelty, both physi
cal and mental: beatings, whether with a broomstick, a knotted elec
tric flex or a horsewhip, were routine; Laxmi’s eyes were damaged
when they threw a bunch of keys at her face; they yanked out two
h
2 8 / THE NEW SLAVERY
gold teeth. They told her that one of her four children had been
killed in a motorcycle accident, and beat her when she broke down
and cried. It was only years later that she discovered they were
lying.
While in London the princesses frequently went out at 8pm and
returned home at two or three o’clock in the morning. While they
were away Laxrni had to stand by the door exactly where they had
left her. On their return she had to massage their hands and feet
and, should they be in a bad mood, suffer kicks while she did so.
She slept, rarely for more than two hours a night, on the :floor out
side the locked kitchen, drinking forbidden water from the bath tap.
She was permanently hungry and often denied food altogether for
days at a time. There was plenty of food, but it was in the dustbin
and deliberately spoiled so that she could not eat it even if she man
aged to put her hands between the bars on the windows and reach it. 19
One day, by chance, the front door was left unlocked and LaXIni
managed to escape. When she reached the Indian High Commission
they sent her back to the princesses because she could not afford the
airfare home. To add legal insult to her injuries, as soon as Laxmi ran
away from her “employers” she was in violation of the immigration
rules that tied her to them, and she was liable for immediate deporta
tion. An investigation by Anti-Slavery International held ” the effects of
the Immigration Acts as they touch upon overseas domestic workers,
the non-issuance of work permits to these workers, and the effective
treatment of these workers as appendages of the employer rather than
individuals in their own right, to be responsible for the servitude these
domestics suffer in Britain. The Home Office, however inadvertently,
is supporting slavery.”20
If governments in countries such as Britain that abjure slavery can be
duped, imagip.e how easily those who profit from slavery can be con
vinced to ignore it. In Thailand the government has always been am
bivalent about the commercial sex trade and not particularly interest�d
in making those involved with it comply with laws that would markedly
THE NEW SLAVERY / 2 9
reduce the incomes of many police officials. The extreme profitability
of slavery means that slaveholders can buy political power and accep
tance. In Thailand, Pakistan, India, and Brazil, local police act as en
forcers of the ” contracts” that conceal slavery. These police are the
muscle for hire that can be sent after a runaway slave. Their availabil
ity and use by slaveholders point to another central theme in the new
slavery: its emergence when the social order breaks down.
T H E W I L D W E ST S YN D R O M E It is the hallmark of a civilized society that
the government has a monopoly over armed violence. That is not to
say that violence does not occur in advanced democracies, but when it
does the force of the state is brought to bear and attempts are made to
lock up the violent person. In our minds, lawlessness means fearing vi
olence at every moment, as chaos and brutality reign. Order and safety
mean that there are laws that most people obey most of the time, and
legal force backs up those laws. For those who have always lived in a so
ciety where the police are usually honest, where criminals are usually
locked up, where disagreements end in bad feelings and not death, it is
hard to imagine the lawlessness in much of the developing world. The
old Wild West has the reputation of having been lawless, in a dusty past
when gunslingers could terrorize whole towns, but even then a sheriff
or a U.S. marshal was ready to clean up Deadwood come morning. The
reality in parts of the developing world today is much, much worse.
In Europe and North America the police fight organized crime; in
Thailand the police are organized crime. The same holds true for many
parts of Africa and Asia: the state’s monopoly on violence, the monop
oly that should protect citizens, has been turned against them. This
disintegration of civil order often occurs in times of rapid social and
political change. A community und�r stress, whether caused by dis.
ease, natural disaster, economic depression, or war, can break up and
descend into the horror of “might makes right.” These are the condi
tions found in areas of rapid development such as the frontier areas of
Brazil or at the rural/urban interface in Thailand. There, transitional
l
3 0 / THE NEW SLAVERY
economies drive farming families off the land and leave them destitute,
while fostering a demand for unskilled labor in the cities. With destitu-
ti.on, traditional systems of family or community support for the vul
nerable collapse-and in these countries they are not replaced with any
effective state welfare measures. Without protection or alternatives, the
poor become powerless, and the violent, without state intervention, be
come supremely powerful.
Slavery blossoms in these circumstances. To control their slaves,
slaveholders must be able to use violence as much and as often as they
choose. Without permanent access to violence, they are impotent. The
old slavery often regulated the violence a master could use against a
slave. Though often ignored, th.e slave codes of the American South,
which prohibited the teaching of reading and writing and recommended
a program of strict discipline, also protected slaves from murder and
2 1mutilation and set minimum standards of food and clothing.e How
ever, the codes gave the master, as his legal right, a complete monopoly
on violence short of murder. If the master needed it, the law and the
power of the state would back him up, for the state was allowed to
murder (execute) slaves. Today, the monopoly of violence is often de
centralized. It resides not in national law but in the hands and weapons
of local police or soldiers. In fact, we can say that this transfer of the
monopoly of violence from central government to local thugs is es
sential if the new slavery is to take root and flourish. \Vb.at normally
brings it about is the head-on collision of the modern and traditional
ways of life.
Transition zones where the world’s industrial economy meets the tra
ditional culture of peasant farming are found throughout the develop
ing world. At the interface there are often bloody struggles over the
control of natural resources. In the Amazon a small but terrible war
continues over the region’s mineral wealth and timber as the line of ex
ploitation advances. The Amazonian Indians have little to fight with,
and they are pushed back repeatedly, killed wholesale, and sometimes
enslaved. The new open mines ripped from the forests are hundreds of
THE NEW SLAVERY / 3 1
miles from direct government control. Here those with the most fire
power run the show, and those without weapons obey orders or disap
pear. The few local police have a choice: cooperate with the thugs and
make a profit, or attempt to enforce the law and die. The result is the
lawlessness and terror that Antonia Pinto described at the beginning of
this chapter. In a mining village that does not expect the government to
interfere anytime soon, the choice is clear and a brutal social order as
serts itself. The situation in Brazil is dramatic, but the same trend ap
pears from rural Ghana to the slums of Bangkok, from the highlands of
Pakistan to the villages of the Philippines-and this Wild West syn
drome strongly affects what can be done to end slavery.
From Knowled g e to Freedom
Looking at the nature of the new: slavery we see ob�ious themes: slaves
are cheap and disposable; control continues without legal ownership;
slavery is hidden behind contracts; and slavery flourishes in communi
ties under stress. Those social conditions have to exist side by side with
an economy that fosters slavery. Order sometimes breaks down in Eu
ropean or American communities, but slavery doesn’t take hold. This is
because very, very few people live in the kind of destitution that makes
them good candidates for slavery. In most Western countries the ex
treme differential in power needed to enslave doesn’t exist, and the
idea of slavery is abhorrent. When most of the population has a reason
able standard of living and some financial security (whether their own
or assured by government safety nets), slavery can’t thrive.
Slavery grows best in extreme poverty, so we can identify its eco
nomic as well as social preconditions. Most obviously, there have to be
people, perhaps nonnative to an area, who can be enslaved as well as a
demand for slave labor. Slaveholders must have the resources to fund
the purchase, capture, or enticement of slaves and the power to control
them after enslavement. The cost of keeping a slave has to be less than
or equal to the cost of hiring free labor. And there must be a demand
ltnaz
3 2 / THE NEW SLAVE RY
for .slave products at a price that makes slaveholding profitable. More
over,. the potential slave must lack perceived alternatives to enslave
ment. Being poor, homeless, a refugee, or abandoned can all lead to
the desperation that opens the door to slavery, making it easy for the
slaver to lay an attractive trap. And when slaves are kidnapped, they
must lack sufficient power to defend themselves against that violent
enslavement.
It may seem that I am too insistent on setting out these conditions
and themes in the new slavery. But the new slavery is like a new disease
for which no vaccine exists. Until we really understand it, until we
really know what makes it work, we have little chance of stopping it.
And this disease is spreading. As the new slavery increases, the num
ber of people enslaved grows every day. We’ re facing an epidemic of
slavery that is tied through the global economy to our own lives.
These conditions also suggest why some of the current strategies
might not stop the new slavery. Legal remedies that enforce prohibi
tions against ownership are ineffective, since enslavement and control
are achieved without ownership.22 When ownership is not required for
slavery, it can be concealed or legitimated within normal labor con
tracts. For laws against slavery to work, there must be clear violations
that can be prosecuted. To be sure, other laws make it a violation to
take away basic human rights, to restrict movement, to take labor with
out pay, or to force people to work in dangerous conditions. Slavery is
unquestionably the ultimate human rights violation short of murder,
but to uncover such violations requires two things: political will and
an ability to protect the victim. If a government has no motivation to
guarantee human rights within its borders, those rights can disappear.
If those whose rights are violated cannot find protection, they are un
likely to accuse and fight those with guns and power. Such is the case
in many of the countries where slavery exists today.
This lack of protection is the main problem in trying to stop the new
slavery. The United Nations calls on national governments to protect
their citizens and enforce their laws. But if the governments choose to
https://ownership.22
THE NEW SLAVERY / 3 3
ignore the UN, there is little that the UN can do. In 1986 the United
Nations received reports of families being kidnapped into slavery in
Sudan. In 1996, ten years after being asked to address the problem, the
government of Sudan finally announced an official inquiry. Its deadline
for announcing the results of the inquiry, August 1996, passed without
any comment; meanwhile new reports indicate that Dinka women and
children in the Sudan are still being kidnapped and forced into slavery
by government-backed militias. If slavery continues because national
governments turn a blind eye, cooperate with slaveholders, or even en
slave people themselves, then the diplomatic approach will have little
impact.
That is why it is necessary to ask two questions: What can make ( or
help) these governments protect their own citizens? And what do we
know about the new slavery that can help us put a stop to it, if national
governments won’t? Both have economic answers. If we have learned
one thing from the end of apartheid in South Africa, it is that hitting a
government in the pocketbook hard enough can make it change its
ways. If slavery stops being profitable, there is little motivation to en
slave. But what do we really know about the economics of the new
slavery? The answer, I’ m afraid, is almost nothing. That is the reason I
began this journey. In Thailand, Mauritania, Brazil, Pakistan, and In
dia (all countries that have signed the United Nations agreements on
slavery and bonded labor), I investigated local slavery. In each case I
looked hard into how slavery worked as a business, and how the sur
rounding community protected slavery by custom or ignored it in fear.
When you have met the slaves I met and come to understand their lives,
when you have heard the justifications of the slaveholders and the gov
ernment officials, then you will know the new slavery and, I hope, how
we can work to stop it.
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