ABSTRACT

Antislavery actors evoke the history of the transatlantic slave trade in campaigns to mobilise action to address the suffering experienced by contemporary migrants described as ‘victims of trafficking’. That framing has been picked up by state actors who present measures to supress unauthorised migration per se as necessary to protect migrants from a ‘modern-day slave trade’. Yet the parallel between trafficking and the slave trade is undermined by the fact that people who today are described as ‘trafficked’, as much as those described as ‘smuggled’, actively wish to travel and do so in the hope that by moving, they will secure greater freedoms. This article therefore asks whether there are similarities between the journeys of contemporary unauthorised migrants and those of enslaved people who fled from slavery in the Atlantic World, and if so, why. Bringing data from historical sources on slave flight into dialogue with data on the journeys of contemporary sub-Saharan African migrants to Europe and Brazil, it identifies a number of experiential parallels, and argues that for those concerned with migrants’ rights, enslaved people’s fugitivity potentially offers a more fruitful point of historical comparison than does the slave trade.

摘要

反奴隶制行动者在运动中唤起跨大西洋奴隶贸易的历史，以动员行动解决被称为“贩运受害者”的当代移民所经历的苦难。这种框架已被国家行为者采纳，他们提出了禁止未经授权的移民本身的措施，以保护移民免受“现代奴隶贸易”的影响。然而，贩运和奴隶贸易之间的相似之处被以下事实所破坏：今天被描述为“被贩运”的人与被描述为“走私”的人一样积极地希望旅行并这样做是希望通过移动，他们将获得更大的自由。因此，本文询问当代非法移民的旅程与逃离的被奴役者的旅程是否有相似之处来自大西洋世界的奴隶制，如果是这样，为什么。将奴隶逃亡的历史数据与当代撒哈拉以南非洲移民前往欧洲和巴西的旅程数据进行对话，确定了一些经验上的相似之处，并认为对于那些关心移民权利的人来说，被奴役的人的逃亡可能提供了比奴隶贸易更有成效的历史比较点。