Is it true that there are more slaves in the world now than ever at one point in history?

score:80

Accepted answer

Let's start with some basic facts.

  1. There are more people in the world today than ever before in human history.
  2. Because of 1) there are more poor people in the world than for most of human history, even though the percentage is falling.
  3. Some percentage of desperately poor people work under inhuman conditions that many "civilized" people would characterized as "slavery."
  4. Slavery is hard to define. So let's take its historical definition; where an interest in a slave was an ownership position with clear property title and transfer rights sanctioned by the owner's government. No modern government condones slavery in this form. There are no places where there is clear, lawful transferable title to a slave at a national level. By this (de jure) definition, there are fewer slaves in the world today than there were in say, the 19th century.
  5. There are, in some parts of the world, forms of "employment" that could reasonably be construed as "de facto" slavery, where individuals are trafficked and exploited in contravention of existing laws. Counting such individuals would expand the definition of slavery beyond the historical one.
  6. If you took an "apples to oranges" comparison of the types of people in 5), above, you may well find that those people outnumber the people counted and characterized in previous centuries as slaves under number 4.
  7. Even so, an apples to apples comparison is hard to come by because statistics for previous centuries do not always include the de facto, as opposed to the de jure kind of slaves.

Upvote:1

Tom Au's enumerated answer is really good. That said, you merely have to provide statistics that make it implausible that there could ever have been as many slaves as we estimate are in existence today.

This should be relatively easy when considering the massive increase in population over the past ~200 years. Take a glance at any world population graph, and consider that the percentage of enslaved population must fall with a factor equal to the factor of total population growth, for the absolute number of enslaved to diminish.

So for example, a population of 1,5 billion, with 30% of the population enslaved, would have to develop into a world with less than 6% (30%/5) enslaved, when the population reaches 7,5 (1,5x5) billion.

Insert your own data points and you will have the answer you seek.

Upvote:21

The claim has certainly been made on a number of occasions. In an article titled Chained to scourge of slavery in the Sydney Morning Herald (dated 6 December 2012), the Australian journalist, Elizabeth Farrelly, observed:

The United Nations estimates there are more slaves in the world now than ever. Human trafficking - which is not the same as slavery though the two are clearly linked, since most slaves are trafficked and most trafficking ends in slavery - rates with arms and drug trafficking among the world's richest illicit industries.

As regards definitions, "slavery" is defined in article 1 of the Slavery Convention of 1926, as:

“the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised”.

There is no internationally agreed definition of servitude, but the term is generally used to describe a condition of serfdom, without implying an element of ownership of the victim as the term “slavery” does.

It isn't clear exactly which report is being referred to in the article quoted above (if only journalists cited their sources!). There are a few possibilities. A strong contender is the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, 2012.

So, in short, it seems that the answer is yes. It appears that there are actually now more slaves in the world than ever before.

Obviously, it must be noted that the global population is greater now, but the statistic is nevertheless particularly remarkable since slavery is illegal in most modern countries today.

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