2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(1) pockets of global supply chains. 2 Similarly, with the exponential growth of the human population and the resulting cheapening of human life, purchasing an enslaved person is no longer a major investment. Particular individuals are as readily bought and discarded as other consumer products that were once cherished and maintained. 3 Even to see enslavement in contemporary global circumstances, one therefore had to adjust one’s expectations and the indices one would be looking to detect. At the same time, what is remarkably consistent is who is most vulnerable to facing enslavement and what distinguishes their enslavement from other forms of exploited labour. Still, for many critics, researchers and activists working on contemporary enslavement were playing fast and loose with that designation. It was not clear what measures defined its parameters; if the word ‘slavery’ was not simply being used as a metaphor to demand all-too-scant political attention to some and not others. Furthermore, could any of these cases of forced labour be slavery if they operated separately from a legal institution that was widely seen as socially permissible? These, and other such challenges, deserve serious consideration, especially because they are raised by scholars who have richly contributed to the diagnosis of historical and contemporary varieties of unfreedom. Thinking through them will sharpen the thinking that informs research and policymaking efforts. For starters, although many historians of slavery are averse to universal definitions because its forms and meanings have been so varied, Joel Quirk has rightly pointed out that differences among slave systems did not hamper the crosscultural trade in enslaved people. 4 Similarly, Bales echoes key dimensions of Moses I Finley, David Brion Davis and Orlando Patterson’s earlier discussions when he offers that: Slavery is the control of one person (the slave) by another (the slaveholder or slaveholders). This control transfers agency, freedom of movement, access to the body, and labor and its product and benefits to the slaveholder. The control is supported and exercised through violence and its threat. The aim of this control is primarily economic exploitation but may include sexual use or psychological benefit. 5 2 3 4 5 See Moisés Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (Anchor Books 2005); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (University of California Press 2000) (‘Disposable People’); Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery: A Reader (University of California Press 2005); Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves (Cornell University Press 2008); Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter, The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today (University of California Press 2009); Kevin Bales, Zoe Trodd and Alex Kent Williamson, Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People (One World Publications 2009). See also Felicity Lawrence, ‘How Did We Let Modern Slavery Become Part of Our Everyday Lives?’, The Guardian (online, 2 April 2018) <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/02/modern-slavery-daily-lifeexploitation-goods-services>. Bales, Disposable People (n 2); E Benjamin Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern Day Slavery (Free Press 2008) 1–41. Joel Quirk, Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery (UNESCO Publishing 2009). Kevin Bales, ‘Professor Kevin Bales’s Response to Professor Orlando Patterson’ in Jean Allain (ed), The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford University Press 2012) 293, 301. 154