This approachable volume uncovers the often-hidden history behind the persistence and resilience of modern slavery in the United States, tracing its evolution from the forced labor on nineteenth-century plantations to today’s hidden global networks of coercion, exploitation and human trafficking. In the period leading up to our modern era, Americans participated in, and profited from, the enslavement of African men and women, Native American children, Chinese peasants, Polynesian islanders, American sailors, and teenage girls from Asia and Eastern Europe. Historical in approach, American Slavery Since Abolition explores the evolution of distinctly modern forms of exploitation such as the Prison Industrial Complex, the gig economy, enslavement by the algorithm, cloning and organ theft. Engaging with concepts of agency and coercion, wage slavery and economic inequality, the book unravels how old systems of domination seem to have been continuously reshaped and reinvigorated by new technologies, requiring ever-expanding supply chains. It shows how these encourage exploitation, despite near-continuous efforts to abolish the repulsive trade in human misery, and in doing so, exposes the troubling ways in which the modern USA, and most other economies, continue to participate in, and depend on, unfree labor. Lucid and unsettling, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American history, politics, sociology and American studies.
