The 'modern day' trade in human beings: How historical experience influences the contemporary trafficking in persons

What is so modern about modern day slavery? This question served as the launching point for this dissertation. The central argument of this research project is that contemporary trafficking is an evolutionary stage of prior forms of the trade in human beings. The project teams a structurationist model to a historical institutionalist approach to understand the evolutionary path of the trade in human beings. The data demonstrates that the persistence of the trade in human beings is not solely economic but is also related to state interest and proslavery discourses. The project not only traces the evolution of the trade in human beings for sexual and labor exploitation from 1600 to 1930, but also provides a careful analysis of this evolution to the present day in the US, Sweden and Italy.; The project concludes that the evolution of the trade in human beings holds significant implications for the way in which we understand trafficking's operation today. The first implication of the research is that ahistorical models of trafficking provide an insufficient understanding of the phenomena. Traffickers in human beings are as much a collective of historical discourses concerning natural slaves as they are profit maximizers or rationalists. Such a finding provides a new window into our understanding of transnational organized crime in general.; The second implication is that historical experience with the trade in human beings impacts the manifestation of contemporary trafficking. Sweden's short and sporadic historical experience with the trade in human beings led to a contemporary situation that is inherently hostile to trafficking in persons. Yet the long and intense historical experience with the trade in human beings in Italy and the US left economic and ideological foundations that foster heterogeneous and widespread trafficking cases in each country.; The last implication of the study is scholars of international relations cannot continue to focus on norms and governance as inherently benevolent. This study reveals normative discourses and forms of governance that are malevolent in intent and destructive in operation. Scholars of international relations thus need to considers how illicit spaces are ordered and governed.