Introduction

Over the last twenty-five to thirty years fundamental changes have taken place in the global labour market (Wallerstein 1995; Harvey 2005; Arrighi 2007). The unconstrained development of capital accumulation into new regions has not only intensified international competition, but brought about changes in the rate of exploitation and surplus extraction. Many of these changes in exploitation and accumulation, most commonly characterised under the descriptive term of neoliberalism, have been constructed on a strategy of driving out millions of people from, what we may loosely describe as, the formal economy into informal grey zones (Fraser 2014). The journey from the formal to the informal, which takes place both within and across national borders, has been in part facilitated, and often driven, by the illegal trafficking of human beings. It is by no means accidental that over this past of a quarter century human trafficking has emerged as a major global problem.

Lee (2005) argues that the increase in transnational border crossings over this period has been stimulated not only by the distinctive role of markets in neoliberal society, but also in part by political turmoil, social conflict and civil war where migration through irregular means has become the only means of escape for many caught up in such events. She argues that the combination of enlarged global flows of people caused by both economic and political factors, and reduced formal migration programmes has encouraged breaches of migration rules and the trading of people as ‘commodities’. Many authors such as Bales (2012) and Skinner (2008) view this commodification of people as a modern form of slavery, arguing that there are now more ‘slaves’ worldwide than when slavery was abolished in the United States in 1861. However, an important difference between then and now is the replacement of a legal market with an illegal one, and such comparisons, while highlighting the moral bankruptcy of human trafficking, are problematic as the social and economic conditions of both forms of ‘slavery’ are fundamentally different not only in relation to different forms of capital and exploitation, but also to new forms of consumption (see Blackburn 2010).