2012-2013 Rice Seminar: "Human Trafficking Past and Present: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Disciplines"

Human Trafficking has been announced as the topic for the 2012-2013 inaugural seminar. The twenty-first century has witnessed a global expansion of slavery and the slave trade. Long considered a relic of the past that had been dismantled during the emancipation period of the nineteenth century, coerced labor is spreading as part of the informal labor sector not only in economically depressed countries, but also in emerging industrialized economies and the most advanced industrialized and democratic societies. Recent scholarship has emphasized the protean nature of slavery up through the nineteenth century, as well as the new forms of bound labor that emerged in the twentieth. Processes of modern globalization have exacerbated this modern form of slavery and the attendant slave trading that is now most commonly referred to as human trafficking.

Contemporary human trafficking is a social phenomenon and human rights crisis that is not well understood in terms of its historical origins and precedents. This is in part because misconceptions about historical slavery obscure continuities with the present. Too often we think that slavery in the past was plantation slavery. In fact, scholars have shown that slavery was common in a vast array of past societies, and that slaves played different roles in different places at different times. It is true the millions of enslaved African who were transported across the Atlantic lived and died growing staple crops on plantations, but countless others worked as laborers in town and country, as craftsmen in urban and rural workshops, as transportation workers on roads, rivers and oceans, as domestic and sexual workers in homes, taverns and brothels, and as industrial workers in factories and mines. If we look beyond slavery in the Americas, the variety only increases, with many victims of slavery throughout the world having also worked as soldiers, domestic guardians, public laborers, and tutors. We believe that modern human trafficking is best understood as yet another chapter in the long story of the adaptation of bound labor to new and changing circumstances.

Co-directed by Rice University history professors James Sidbury and Kerry Ward, the course will begin with the history of slavery and slave trading, considering both U.S. and global histories of slavery through the 19th century. With these foundational discussions in mind, the course will turn to modern forms of human trafficking, exploring how 20th century political initiatives sought to globalize the suppression of slavery through human rights discourses. Narrowing the focus of the topic, the seminar will use Houston as a case study to examine the public and private philanthropic actors working to combat new forms of slave trading and labor exploitation. By examining these histories and discourses across a long-ranging historical period and through interdisciplinary approaches, the seminar will work to produce innovative work that shows the intersection between local and global cultures of human trafficking.

For more information on the Rice Seminars, please contact Lauren Kleinschmidt at the Humanities Research Center.