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On New Year's Day 2011, I flew to Lagos to research human trafficking in Nigeria. Towards the end of my trip, I visited a small town called Badagry, about a two-hour drive west of Lagos. In 1502, Portuguese colonists built one of the first slave-trading posts along the coast of West Africa in this city. The non-descript, two-story building still stands today as a museum, but for more than 300 years, it was one of the most active slavetrading outposts in West Africa. Estimates are that almost 600,000 West Africans were shipped from Badagry to the Americas to be agricultural slaves. That figure represents approximately one in twenty of all slaves transported from West Africa to the Americas during the entire time of the North Atlantic Slave Trade.
It was a haunting experience walking through the old slave-holding pens, gazing at the iron shackles, imagining the fear and terror that must have coursed through the veins of slaves as they awaited their fates. Like so many millions today, those 600,000 individuals transported from Badagry to the Americas were victims of human trafficking. In fact, all 12 to 13 million of the West African slaves transported across the Atlantic to the Americas were victims of human trafficking. While their lengthy journeys at sea are very different from the journeys of most human trafficking victims today, the purpose of those journeys remains the same: the callous exploitation of the labor of vulnerable people in order to maximize profit.
The Nature of Slavery Today
However, unlike the agricultural and domestic slaves of the past, today's victims of modern-day slave trading are exploited in countless industries, and they are vastly more profitable. Whether for commercial sex, construction, domestic work, carpet weaving, agricul- ture, tea and coffee, shrimp, fish, minerals, dimensional stones, gems, or numerous other industries that I have investigated, human trafficking touches almost every sector of the globalized economy in a way it never has before. Understanding the reasons for this shift in the fundamental nature of human trafficking is vital if more effective efforts to combat it are to be deployed. The key thesis to understand is that the slave exploiter's ability to generate immense profits at almost no real risk directly catalyzed the pervasiveness of all...