2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(1) they retain the physical capacity to move, they usually lack the legal, and often social, rights to do so. 11 There are clear patterns in who must find their way around rather than through borders and who can only enter as labourers through systems in which their situation is deliberately made precarious. There are states willing to extract the labour of people whose inclusion they remain determined to bar. These migrants belong to groups whose exploitation is normalised to the point of regularised invisibility, justified as inevitably preferable to whatever other alternatives might be available to them. More generally, it is essential to recognise that enslavement, historically and in the present, is not a radical exception. Indeed, it is such a constant feature of human history that it is its eradication or relative transformation that requires explanation. While contemporary abolitionists distinguish what is transpiring now from the ‘old slavery’, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was quintessentially modern. Before it, the enslaved were always foreigners or the conquered, but they were also multiracial and multinational. Indeed, what divided pre-trans-Atlantic models was whether the places practicing enslavement were full-fledged empires, seeking to offset the costs of perpetual war in ways that made slavery central to their political economy, or whether their battles were local and sporadic, producing slaves that played at best auxiliary roles in the conquering society. This longer view offers models of when who became a slave really was more contingent; how the foreignness of the slave was defined and made meaningful; the difference the labour of slaves made to the conception of their status; and how enslavement became fundamentally racialised and remade to foster capitalist forms of economy and then hybridised to reflect neoliberal, globalised ones. Such a lens makes clear that slavery today remains racialised in ways inaugurated in the trans-Atlantic world through colonisation and enslavement. What has changed is that discrete forms of racialisation internal to parts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, and centred around bodies of water beyond the Atlantic have come together into the most global convergence we have yet seen. Under these circumstances, some members of a denigrated group may not be recognised as such beyond national or regional borders where those differences are salient. For others, they seem to bear marks of misfortune the world over. This is particularly the case for African-descended and Indigenous peoples. 12 As a human institution — that is thoroughly corrosive of human relations — enslavement inevitably reflects and expresses geopolitical economic circumstances that are anchored in accretions of historical relations that birthed the shape of the present. Just as it would be a mistake to treat enslavement today as a complete break from the past, it would be a major intellectual and political error to conclude that slavery could not continue after its decisive trans-Atlantic moment. With statelessness, many who do not work in this area associate it primarily with the conditions of World War II that inspired the creation of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the contemporary 11 12 See Gargi Battacharya, Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and Things (Pluto 2005). See Jonathan Todres, ‘Law, Otherness, and Human Trafficking’ (2009) 49(3) Santa Clara Law Review 1; Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (University of Minnesota Press 2015) ch 5. 156