The Persistence of Slavery
224 pages, 6 x 9
3 maps
Paperback
Release Date:29 Jan 2021
ISBN:9781625345240
Hardcover
Release Date:29 Jan 2021
ISBN:9781625345233
The Persistence of Slavery
An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria
University of Massachusetts Press
Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute "modern slavery" have continued to the present day. To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria's Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children's labor during the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources that include oral interviews, British and Nigerian archival materials, newspaper holdings, and missionary and anthropological accounts, Chapdelaine argues that slavery's endurance can only be understood when we fully examine "the social economy of a child"—the broader commercial, domestic, and reproductive contexts in which children are economic vehicles.
The Persistence of Slavery provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today.
The Persistence of Slavery provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today.
The Persistence of Slavery is an excellent addition to the expanding literature on the history of children and childhood, particularly for its focus on economic history.'—American Historical Review
'The Persistence of Slavery offers a wealth of information on child labor and trafficking in a key period of international concern about slavery . . . [T]he book provides a much-needed focus on African children’s history and opens up new avenues of research.'—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
'Chapdelaine argues in this well-researched book that child trafficking, child slavery, and other forms of coerced labor persisted in Nigeria beyond the nineteenth-century antislavery movement . . . [U]sing the same colonial records that earlier studies on the Women’s War relied on, Chapdelaine’s book successfully goes beyond them to establish how exploitation of children’s bodies has remained significant to capital and wealth generation within Nigeria’s socioeconomic arrangements.'—Journal of African History
'The Persistence of Slavery is a major intervention in the scholarship on unfree labor in Nigeria and Africa more broadly, as well as in research on modern childhoods, gender, and the family.'—Journal of Family History
'An important, original contribution to the history of child trafficking in the twentieth century, the history of children globally, and to Nigerian and West African history, in general.'—Benjamin N. Lawrance, editor in chief of African Studies Review and author of Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling
'One of the few book-length studies on the history of children in colonial Africa, The Persistence of Slavery is necessary and timely. It will be a first choice for courses on African history and childhood studies.'—Saheed Aderinto, author of When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958
ROBIN PHYLISIA CHAPDELAINE is assistant professor of history at Duquesne University.
