Modern slavery, global capitalism & deproletarianisation in West Africa

Kate Manzo

Review of African Political Economy, 2005, vol. 32, issue 106, 521-534

Abstract: This paper explores the concept of ‘new’ or modern slavery in the wake of media reports of widespread child slavery on cocoa plantations in Côte d'Ivoire (the RCI). The first part defines slavery as unpaid forced labour, identifies the defining feature of modern slavery as the shift in the master-slave relation from legal ownership to illegal control, and then draws on a range of secondary sources to show that child slavery does exist in the Côte d'Ivoire even if numbers are contested. The many thousands of child slaves apparently trafficked from Mali make this a West African (and not simply Ivorian) phenomenon. The aspects of global capitalist development used in part two to explain the Ivorian situation, namely deproletarianisation and the costs of adjustment are also wider processes not unique to one country. The focus on the RCI as a case study is therefore intended as a stimulus to further questions and broader research into the relationship between capitalism and modern slavery in Africa.

Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03056240500467013 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revape:v:32:y:2005:i:106:p:521-534

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CREA20

DOI: 10.1080/03056240500467013

Access Statistics for this article

Review of African Political Economy is currently edited by Graham Harrison, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Claire Mercer, Nicolas Pons-Vignon, Aurelia Segatti and Ray Bush

More articles in Review of African Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().