Slavery is not history
Most people think slavery ended in the nineteenth century. It did not. It changed its clothes and carried on. William Wilberforce spent twenty years persuading Parliament to abolish the slave trade. Britain then spent decades and a fortune using the Royal Navy to stamp it out at sea. That was a country that did not merely stop the practice. It set out to stop everyone else.
Today tens of millions of people live in conditions their owners would have recognized in 1807. They are bought, bonded, married off, or marched to work. Some governments run the system. Some shrug at it. Some fight it hard. Yet we lump them together under vague headings such as ‘human rights concerns,’which flatters the worst and fails to credit the best.
What is needed is a simple, honest scale. Call it the Wilber Force. It ranks every country from 1 to 10, from those where slavery is practiced to those that have rooted it out and work to end it elsewhere. A ranking does what a report cannot. It names, it compares, and it shames.
The scale turns on one distinction. There is a world of difference between what a state does, what it permits, and what it prevents. A country whose government runs the camps should not share a score with one whose police are merely slow.
1. Slavery by the state, or slavery in the open. The government enslaves, or people are owned and sold. North Korea works prisoners to death and hires out its citizens abroad for hard currency. Eritrea conscripts its young into national service with no end date. In Mauritania, slave status is still inherited, decades after abolition. In Libya, migrants have been sold at auction.
2. Women or minorities held in servitude. A whole class of people is stripped of the rights that make a person free. Afghanistan under the Taliban bars women from schooling, from most work, and from moving about without a male escort. China ships Uyghurs from Xinjiang to factories they did not choose.
3. Servitude written into law. The legal system ties the worker to the master. Under the kafala system in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, employers can hold passports and block a worker from leaving. Turkmenistan still marches its people into the cotton fields.
4. Bondage on a mass scale, tolerated by the state. Debt bondage, child marriage, and forced labour flourish while officials look away or take a cut. Brick kilns in Pakistan, bonded farm labour in parts of India, and child brides in Niger and Chad belong here.
5. Banned on paper, rife in practice. The laws are fine. The enforcement is feeble or bought. Russia, Tajikistan, and Nigeria are examples.
6. Real reform, real gaps. These governments are moving, but have far to go. Qatar and the UAE have loosened kafala without abolishing it. Thailand has cleaned up parts of its fishing fleets. Uzbekistan deserves special mention for ending forced labour in its cotton harvest. It shows that countries can climb.
7. Clean at home, quiet abroad. Slavery is rare and prosecuted, but little is done about supply chains or about other nations. Japan, whose trainee scheme for foreign workers drew sustained criticism, sits here, along with South Korea. Brazil earns its place with a bold public blacklist of employers caught using forced labour.
8. Clean at home, careful about what it buys. These countries prosecute firmly and make companies answer for slavery in their supply chains. Germany, France, Australia, and Canada qualify.
9. Clean at home and campaigning abroad. Add diplomatic pressure, sanctions, and import bans. Britain, with its Modern Slavery Act of 2015, the United States, with its annual trafficking report and its ban on goods from Xinjiang, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
10. No slavery, and fighting it everywhere. This rung is empty. Every country has some trafficking, and Walk Free estimates that more than 100,000 people are held in modern slavery in Britain alone. That should be said plainly. A 10 that nobody reaches is a target, not a trophy.
A ranking is only as good as its evidence. The Wilber Force should rest on published data, not on impressions or prejudice. The Global Slavery Index from Walk Free is the natural starting point. Its 2023 edition put North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tajikistan, the UAE, Russia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait worst for prevalence. The US State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons report provides a useful cross-check.
Scores should be based on rates, not raw totals. India and China hold millions in bondage, but they also hold a third of humanity. Counting heads alone would bury the small states where the burden is heaviest.
Each placement should cite the specific law or practice that earns it. The Gulf states will protest loudly, and they should be met with chapter and verse rather than adjectives.
Finally, the ranking should be repeated every year. A one-off verdict is soon forgotten. A league table that moves gives governments something to climb, and something to fear slipping down.
Wilberforce did not win by wringing his hands or wearing a wrist-band. He won with facts, with persistence, and by making the trade too shameful to defend. A ranking can do the same work in a modern way. Governments that ignore lectures pay surprising attention to league tables, especially when their neighbours are above them.
Wilberforce needed twenty years to get abolition through Parliament. The Wilber Force should at least get a few countries moving faster
Madsen Pirie