Slavery did not end with abolitionism in the 19th century. Instead it was rebuilt, again and again, into new forms of unfree labour that still shape the world today
That is the basis of new research led by Dr Rui Gomes Coelho from our Department of Archaeology. His latest work uses archaeology to examine the evolution of slavery beyond the age of abolition.
Rebuilt, not abolished
Drawing on cases from Brazil, the United States, Australia, Angola, Germany and Spain, the research shows that convict labour, colonial forced labour and contemporary human trafficking are not leftovers from an older world.
Their roots lay in the transatlantic slave trade of the 15th and 19th centuries and the related European colonial systems. Both enslaved and exploited millions.
However, post-abolition, these were still built into modern societies, and shaped by race, ethnicity and gender. In some cases, such as in Nazi Germany, these were used as a genocidal practice.
In places such as contemporary Spain, sexual exploitation relies on human trafficking networks that affect primarily foreign, poor and racialised women, echoing colonial mechanisms that emerged to enforce inequalities.
The research argues that the idea of "modern slavery" as an oddity that will fade hides how capitalism and empire keep producing unfree workers.
Specific materialities needed for this process, from plantation layouts and company villages to brothel architectures, made subjugation routine, and therefore tolerable within a society that considers itself liberal and post-slavery.
By analysing these material traces, archaeology shows that there is continuity from the last decades of plantation slavery until today.
Why it matters
For unfree labour to be accepted, the team argues, it must first be made to seem normal, anchored in physical things: the layout of a plantation, a company village, a prison.
Archaeology can recover those traces and connect cases that would otherwise seem unrelated.
Recording these places, they suggest, is not neutral. It is a way of bearing witness, and of insisting that unfree labour remains central to the world we live in now.
Slavery did not simply disappear. It was redesigned, and hidden in the buildings, landscapes and routines of everyday life. By recentring archaeology, we want to open a new field that can trace that machinery, from the plantation to the labour camp and the roadside club.
