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improving urban quality of life, but is seen to
be symptomatic of societies where the disad-
vantaged have less ‘right to the city’ (Mitchell,
1997a). phslavery A condition of bondage and servi-
tude in which one person owns another, for-
cibly exacts labour and services from them,
and excludes them from civil society.
Slavery has ancient roots in disparate parts of
the world and has taken multiple forms. But
up to the nineteenth century allempireswere
slave-owning societies, and slavery has been
conceptualized by historians as amode of
productionthat both preceded and coexisted
withfeudalism and withcapitalism. The
close connections between slavery andcolo-
nialismfound their principal expression in the
transatlantic slave trade, which reached its
heyday during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, fed burgeoning European consumer
markets with sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice and
later cotton, and as Blackburn (1998) shows,
was driven more by private capital and mer-
cantile initiative than bystatesponsorship.
An estimated 11.8 million slaves – chiefly from
West Africa – were put to work on plantations,
and millions died of starvation and sickness
in the perilous sea voyage to America. A con-
siderable literature on plantation life in
Brazil, the Caribbean and the American South
examines spatial strategies ofpowerandresist-
ance, modes of paternalism andhegemony,
and the role ofgender,sexualityand African
culturein the making of slave and Creole
communities (see alsotransculturation).
The abolition of colonial – chattel – slavery
stemmed from both metropolitan and colonial
agitation, and cannot simply be explained in
economic terms (e.g. in terms of the declining
value of Caribbean sugar colonies). On the
one hand, the British and French represented
abolition as a distinctly Western triumph, and
strong public sentiment created what David
Brion Davis (cited in Lambert, 2005, p. 10)
describes as ‘a profound change in the basic
paradigmof social geography – a conceptual
differentiation between. .. a ‘‘slave world’’
aberration and a ‘‘free world’’ norm’. But the
formal demise of slavery also stemmed from
slave rebellions and struggles overcitizenship
andhuman rightsthat articulated ideas of
race,nationandempirein complex ways
(Dubois, 2004). Such struggles had a much
greater impact onenlightenmentthought
than has hitherto been recognized, and recent
historical and geographical work on the
mutual constitution of white and blackidentity, and the diasporic and transnational
identities and communities shaped by slavery
(a ‘Black Atlantic’ based on a shared history
of commercial interaction and social degrad-
ation), demonstrates the need for more
integrated and ‘networked’ (less rigidly hier-
archical) understandings of the exactions and
impositions bound up with this mode and
phase of colonization and European commer-
cial outreach.
The distinction between slavery and other
forms of servitude has never been clear-cut,
and in spite of the nineteenth-century aboli-
tion of colonial slavery, slavery-like practices
have persisted, in systems of indentured
labour, and state servitude in fascist
Germany, communist China and the Soviet
Union. The United Nations currently extends
the definition of slavery to an array of wide-
spread human rights abuses (forced labour,
refugeeexploitation,prostitution, pornog-
raphy, people trafficking and the use of chil-
dren in armed conflict). Contemporary
globalization, like the colonial and imperial
globalizations that preceded it, depends on
transnational flows of labour: for millions,
however, the conditions of movement and
the coercion of labour has transformed them
into what Bales (2004) calls ‘disposable
people’. The crucial axis here is notracializa-
tionbut, rather,genderandage: most of
them, perhaps 80 per cent, are female and
around 50 per cent arechildren. Many of
these victims have been induced into crossing
bordersto escapepovertyand find employ-
ment; in order to pay their traffickers, they are
required to work to pay off their ‘debt’ (many
never do) in return for elemental food and
shelter. Trafficking and slavery cannot simply
be folded into one another – the two are con-
ceptually and legally distinct (Manzo, 2005) –
but it is clear that slavery may well occur in the
course of trafficking, and that both involve
extreme forms of exploitation, usually by
criminal gangs. Contemporary slavery cannot
entail legal ownership, butviolencenonethe-
less establishes a regime of control, coercion
and dependence that amounts to effective
ownership. More than 40 per cent of the
victims are forced into the sex trades (cf.
Samarasinghe, 2005), while another 32 per
cent are domestic servants or construction
workers. In June 2006 the US government
estimated that 600,000–800,000 people
were subjected to such labour bondage each
year. The major destinations are Europe,
North America and themiddle east. Many
millions more endure bonded labour as aGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 687 1.4.2009 3:23pmSLAVERY