"Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery"

Unfinished Business was commissioned by UNESCO’s Slave Route project and prepared by Joel Quirk of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE, U.K).

The publication is divided into five chapters:

• defining slavery in all its forms;
  
• presenting data on the scale of slavery, slave trading and other forms of human bondage;
  
• examining differences and similarities between historical and contemporary practices;
  
• identifying, via case studies in the United States, Saint Domingue/Haiti, Great Britain and Portugal, the main paths through which abolition of slavery has historically occurred; and,
  
• through a further series of case studies, exploring the key limitations of the legal abolition of slavery.

This book combines history and sociology to provide the reader with an understanding of the current problems of slavers (and there are tens of millions of slaves in the world) in their historical context.

Slavery may have been legally abolished around the world, but it remains “a widespread and deeply rooted component on contemporary life” concludes the first-ever comparative analysis of historical slave systems and modern forms of human bondage, published online today by UNESCO.

Click here to download the 141 page report.