Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem

Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem. By Suzanne Miers. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2003. Pp. xx, 505. $90.00 cloth, $35.95 paper.

This volume completes the history of abolitionist and international antislavery movements that Suzanne Miers began thirty years ago with her Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London, 1975) and continued with The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988, co-edited with Richard Roberts). Because so much of the book is based on information drawn from British, French, League of Nations, and other archives, as well as official publications, even well informed readers will find unfamiliar the details it brings to light of international efforts against slavery and other forms of unfree labor. Its graceful and disciplined prose is also a rare treat in so scholarly a work.

The first four chapters provide an elegant overview of the antislavery movement down through the Brussels Conference of 1890, and summarize colonial emancipation policies and the early twentieth-century debates about unfree labor scandals in São Tomé, the Congo, and South...